AMD Reveals and Announces New Products Before CES 2018: CPUs

[Guest_Jim_*]

Before CES 2018 started, AMD held an event and showed off a lot of what is coming. To hopefully keep it all easier to read, I am breaking it apart into three news items, with this first one focusing on the CPU announcements. The other two will focus on the APU and GPU announcements.

First up, there have been rumors for a bit now that the Ryzen refresh would be coming early this year, and now we know the Ryzen 2000 series of desktop processors will be launching in April. This new series is based on the Zen+ architecture and will be manufactured on a 12LP process (12nm). This new process enables 10+% better performance compared to the current 14LPP process (14 nm) used and has optimizations to improve performance per watt. AMD SenseMI technology has also been improved, to provide better performance and power efficiency, such as Precision Boost 2 and XFR 2. The X470 chipset will also be released in April, with its optimizations for Ryzen 2000 series CPUs and lower power usage. As these CPUs will still use the AM4 socket though, current motherboards can support them with a BIOS update. For those of you who like the AMD Wraith CPU coolers, the Wraith Prism was also shown off, with its direct contact heat pipes, switchable overclock fan profile, rainbow RGB ring, illuminated fan blades and "dark mode for RGB heathens."

Ahead of the Ryzen 2000 launch, many Ryzen 1000 series products are seeing their suggested prices cut, and by many I mean all but the top two Threadripper CPUs, the 1950X and 1920X, and the lowest Ryzen 3 1300X. The third Threadripper CPU, the 8 core/16 thread 1900X has its SEP drop from $549 to $449, which means you can get this CPU with 64 PCIe lanes and quad-channel memory support for less than the Ryzen 7 1800X's original SEP. All of the Ryzen 7 CPUs have also seen their prices drop, with the 1800X going to $349 (was $499), the 1700X is $309 (was $399), and the 1700 is now $299 (was $329). The 6 core/12 thread Ryzen 5 1600X and 1600 are going to cost you $219 and $189 respectively (previously $249 and $219) while the 4 core/8 thread 1500X is going to be $174 (was $189).

Also appearing on the Ryzen roadmap are the 2^nd generation Threadripper CPUs, but sadly there is no information beyond that release window. Perhaps even more interesting than this though is a slide showing the x86 roadmap for AMD that shows the status of both Zen 2 and Zen 3. According to this, Zen 3 is on track and will use a 7 nm+ process node, while Zen 2 will be on a 7 nm process and its design is complete. My guess is there will continue to be refinements to Zen 2 until sampling starts in the future, but its design is complete and "improves on Zen in multiple dimensions."

 

 

Source: AMD and Slide Decks

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[cjloki]

my AMD stocks took a nice jump today. Now i'm wondering if this is why.

[Guest_Jim_*]

Intel and NVIDIA also went up, so it might have just been a CES bump, but I do think this was a good showing for AMD, especially being able to say Zen 2's design is complete.