AMD Confirms “Refreshed” Navi GPUs with Next-Gen RDNA2 Architecture for 2020

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Image: AMD

During yesterday’s Q4 2019 earnings call, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su had plenty of great news to share with investors and fans alike. She revealed that the company’s quarterly revenue went up by “50 percent year over year (YoY) to a record 2.13 billion,” while the computing and graphics segment’s fourth-quarter revenue went up by “69 percent YoY to 1.66 billion.” AMD also managed to reduce its debt by 524 million.

All of this was just icing on the cake for Radeon fans, however. In response to an analyst’s query, Dr. Su revealed that Navi-based Radeon GPUs would be “refreshed” in the current year. Additionally, she confirmed that RDNA2 would be debuting as part of AMD’s 2020 line up.

David Wong — Nomura Instinet — Analyst

“OK, great. And can you give us some idea of what new GPUs you’re expecting to launch through the rest of 2020 for PCs and for data center?”

Lisa Su — President and Chief Executive Officer

“Yeah. So 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 line up.”

“So, we’re, you know, pretty excited about that, and we’ll talk more about that at our financial analyst day. And on the data center GPU side, you should also expect that we’ll have some new products in the second half of this year.”

There was actually a bit of confusion when this story initially made the rounds. Dr. Su had used the term “refreshed,” which prompted many enthusiasts to believe that the current Radeon lineup (e.g., RX 5700 XT) would be revised with an updated architecture.

AMD later clarified that these would be all-new products empowered by the next-generation RDNA2 architecture, which is tapped to usher in ray tracing, variable rate shading, and other major graphical improvements. A refreshed lineup isn’t out of the possibility, but apparently, Su did not use that term in the typical sense (i.e., minor improvements to an existing product).

Tsing Mui
News poster at The FPS Review.

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