“AMD”…..Eurobeat Intensifies!
Introduction
On June 27th, in Taipei Taiwan, AMD held its first ever keynote at COMPUTEX this year. This year also marks the 50th anniversary of AMD as a company which fell on May 1st. 2019 is ramping up to be a big and important year for AMD as it prepares to lay the smack down on its competition. The groundwork has been laid, and AMD is coming out swinging on the CPU, chipset and GPU fronts. It’s coming from all corners, at once, packing all the punches from every segment of the computing world. From Datacenter, to gamers to consoles, AMD is truly hitting on all cylinders this year.
In this editorial today we are going to go over some key points from the COMPUTEX keynote as it relates to the enthusiast PC user and gamer for GPU and CPU. These are the technologies we need to focus on moving forward. We are going to skip right to the GPUs starting off. While AMD did discuss new AMD EPYC “Rome” Datacenter oriented CPUs at first, we are going to focus on the new GPU and desktop CPU news in this editorial.
If you would like to watch a replay of the keynote the entire video is posted here.
NAVI Family of GPUs
We’ve been hearing a lot about NAVI GPUs for more than a year now, ever since it was on AMD’s roadmap so long ago. However, little was really known about it, it has only been recently that rumors started to appear. One of the rumors at the time that people were not too happy about was that it was rumored that NAVI would still be based on an evolution of the aging GCN architecture. However, AMD quickly quelled that rumor and spit facts for us at the very start. AMD NAVI family of GPUs will be based on a brand-new architecture called RDNA (Radeon DNA).
Firstly, before we dive into RDNA, it is conformed that GCN is not completely being moved out as an architecture. The GCN architecture will continue to thrive apparently in new Vega GPUs which are being pushed out for large intensive compute workload situations in the high-end desktop and content creation markets. That does mean then that we will be seeing more Vega GPUs in the future, but they will not be oriented for gamers, rather for specific use cases in the high-end markets where high compute loads are needed. That is interesting news, but shouldn’t affect us gamers. The GPUs we want to focus on as gamers and desktop enthusiasts will be the NAVI family of GPUs.