AMD Bringing Next-Gen RDNA GPUs in 2020

[Guest_Jim_*]

It is the time of year when a number of companies are sharing earnings reports for Q4 2019 and Fiscal Year 2019, which also means some information for the future is being shared as well. With AMD's report, which showed significant success thanks to the new Zen 2 based products, there was also a call where President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su stated:

In 2019, we launched our new architecture in GPUs, it's the RDNA architecture, and that was the Navi based products. You should expect that those will be refreshed in 2020 - and we'll have a next generation RDNA architecture that will be part of our 2020 lineup.

Anandtech has a transcript of the entire call and a breakdown of the earnings report.

The use of the word 'refresh' has caused a little confusion as hardware refreshes often refer to re-releasing products with some tweaks, instead of an entirely new product. Tom's Hardware decided to reach out to AMD for clarification and was told the comment indicates we can expect new products based on the next-generation RDNA architecture. This makes sense as a refresh to the investment community, which the earnings call is meant for, means new products.

Unfortunately there were no details given about these new GPUs, but the expectation appears to be that among them will be the so-called 'Big Navi' GPU targeting the high-end. Also the next generation RDNA architecture may be RDNA2, which should have AMD's hardware accelerated ray tracing solution. March 5 will be AMD's Investor Day and Dr. Su said more details would be announced then.

Source: Anandtech and Tom's Hardware

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