The last few years have shown what competition can really do. AMD went from being constantly bottom, to truly kicking some ass with the Zen processor design and they have more to come.
In a new press release covering AMD's Financial Analyst Day, AMD talked about some of their upcoming hardware plans and it's really getting exciting if you're an enthusiast. AMD claims they have now shipped "more than" 260 million of their Zen core procressors across Ryzen and EPYC.
To keep the momentum going, they've updated their roadmap of what's to come. They're going to be introducing another next-generation with Zen 3 later this year. On top of that, Zen 4 is also in the design phase and it should be using the 5nm process, which should bring some more impressive improvements once again. This is while Intel has admitted it's struggling to keep up right now, although they think they will regain some of this when they go to 7nm themselves in 2021.
On top of that, AMD also announced their newer GPU architecture with AMD RDNA will also see a next-generation AMD RDNA 2 which should become available later this year as well. AMD say this will give a "50% performance-per-watt improvement over the first-generation AMD RDNA architecture" and it will also support "hardware-accelerated ray tracing, variable rate shading (VRS) and other advanced features".
Part of all this advancement is their change in how they design the hardware. They said they're expanding upon the chiplet and die stacking, with a new "X3D" packing form that "combines chiplets and hybrid 2.5D and 3D die stacking to deliver more than a 10x increase in bandwidth density".
So late this year we can expect Zen 3 to come to AMD CPUs and AMD RDNA 2-based "Navi 2X" GPUs with AMD getting in the ray tracing game.
A lot to look forward to if you're going to be upgrading your gaming rig.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Last edited by Creak on 6 March 2020 at 1:50 pm UTC
Quoting: CreakI was sure I was going to switch my old AMD FX-8320 for a Ryzen Zen 2 somewhere this year, but I wasn't completely convinced with the AMD RX 5700, though thought it might be a good replacement for my RX 480... I think I'll do my CPU upgrade and wait a little to see the RDNA 2 GPU selection!
I'm going to upgrade my FX-8350 for a Ryzen 7 Gen 2 as well, haha.
Would you go with a X570 motherboard ?
slaapliedje Mar 7, 2020
Quoting: GuestSince RDNA2 will support Ray Tracing does that mean we can use it in games like Quake 2 RTX or Metro Exodus or would those games need to be patched to work with AMD?Good question, considering Nvidia did the work.
Luke_Nukem Mar 7, 2020
Quoting: Guest"combines chiplets and hybrid 2.5D and 3D die stacking to deliver more than a 10x increase in bandwidth density"= Big gaming APUs. At last. This is what i have been waiting for, big fscking APUs able to game properly at 1080p plus gpgpu without latency!
Heck yes! I look forward to having a small cube PC which is almost all mini-ITX mobo and a heatsink. Though it's more likely to look like a shoebox with the power supply included.
Quoting: slaapliedjeDepends on whether AMD adds support for Nvidia's VK_NV_ray_tracing Vulkan extension (somehow I doubt it), or rather the upcoming standard one being worked on by the Vulkan Ray Tracing TSG. The latest info I found is that the group is "fairly far along in the process". A few details about the design can be found on pages 27-30 of these SIGGRAPH presentation slides from last year.Quoting: GuestSince RDNA2 will support Ray Tracing does that mean we can use it in games like Quake 2 RTX or Metro Exodus or would those games need to be patched to work with AMD?Good question, considering Nvidia did the work.
Last edited by tuubi on 7 March 2020 at 9:11 am UTC
Quoting: GuestSince RDNA2 will support Ray Tracing does that mean we can use it in games like Quake 2 RTX or Metro Exodus or would those games need to be patched to work with AMD?From what I understand, there are no standardized extensions for ray tracing, NVIDIA added their own drivers extensions in Vulkan and OpenGL (see https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-turing ). So I doubt AMD will use the same extensions. That said, I'm sure with AMD entering the dance, some standardization will happen. It is a frequent pattern in the world of 3D drivers.
Quoting: aokamiI'm unsure about that.. clearly PCIe 4.0 is the future, but X570 adds yet another (cheap?) fan and thus yet another possible source of noise. Since I don't do video editing, I know I won't need the extra bandwidth PCIe 4.0 offers. So in the end, I'm torn. I guess it will eventually depend on the price of these motherboards too.Quoting: CreakI was sure I was going to switch my old AMD FX-8320 for a Ryzen Zen 2 somewhere this year, but I wasn't completely convinced with the AMD RX 5700, though thought it might be a good replacement for my RX 480... I think I'll do my CPU upgrade and wait a little to see the RDNA 2 GPU selection!
I'm going to upgrade my FX-8350 for a Ryzen 7 Gen 2 as well, haha.
Would you go with a X570 motherboard ?
Last edited by Creak on 7 March 2020 at 4:15 pm UTC
Quoting: CreakI saved quite a lot of money when I went for the X470 instead a few months ago. Don't know if the price difference is still quite as high. I decided that using that cash to buy faster RAM instead was more practical.Quoting: aokamiI'm going to upgrade my FX-8350 for a Ryzen 7 Gen 2 as well, haha.I'm unsure about that.. clearly PCIe 4.0 is the future, but X570 adds yet another (cheap?) fan and thus yet another possible source of noise. Since I don't do video editing, I know I won't need the extra bandwidth PCIe 4.0 offers. So in the end, I'm torn. I guess it will eventually depend on the price of these motherboards too.
Would you go with a X570 motherboard ?
I have to admit remembering a couple of chipset fans with noisy bearings from the olden times might have factored into my decision. Even if these modern ones are likely to be less crappy.
Last edited by tuubi on 7 March 2020 at 6:29 pm UTC
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