3rd Gen Ryzen 9 3900X 12C/24T and Ryzen 3000 family unveiled
"Navi" Radeon RX 5000 series including Radeon RX 5700 GPUs revealed
AMD EPYC "Rome" detailed
COMPUTEX 2019 kicked-off with the first ever launch keynote given by none other than AMD’s CEO, Dr. Lisa Su. AMD had several major announcements lined up of which we had noticed a few leaks but nothing too concrete. All we knew was that Radeon Navi GPUs and 3rd Gen Ryzen processors would certainly be announced. Here are the announcements in detail.
AMD EPYC
Dr. Lisa Su kicked off the day’s announcements with their data centre offerings. AMD EPYC has grown over the last 3 years to now have more than 60 solutions and more than 50 cloud installations. This was followed by pointed out the latest jewel in AMD’s crown, the Frontier Supercomputer at Oak Ridge, National Laboratory which is capable of more than 1.5 exaFLOPS and is supposedly going to be the world’s fastest supercomputer once it goes live.
The meat of the announcement was AMD’s latest collaboration with Microsoft to incorporate AMD EPYC processors into Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing solutions.
Next up, AMD announced AMD’s 2nd Gen EPYC processors codenamed ‘Rome’. This second gen AMD EPYC platform can give up to 64 cores per socket and can reportedly push four times the floating point workload per socket compared to the previous gen EPYC processor. This was showcased with a demonstration that pitted a 64-core/socket AMD EPYC 2-socket solution against an Intel Cascade Lake 8280 28-core/socket 2-socket solution. The EPYC solution was capable of crunching out 19.60 ns/Day compared to the Intel solution. The 2nd Gen EPYC processors will be launched in Q3 2019.
AMD Navi
Sporting what AMD calls as an entirely new microarchitecture called RDNA, the biggest announcement was the new 7nm based GPUs which will be part of AMD’s much anticipated Radeon NAVI GPUs a.k.a. The AMD Radeon RX 5000 family of graphics cards. The naming scheme is centered around this being AMD’s 50th anniversary.
The new microarchitecture, dubbed RDNA, is supposedly different from the existing GCN architecture that has been powering AMD Radeon GPUs since the Southern Islands family i.e. Pitcairn, Tahiti, Oland and Cape Verde. Key improvements include a new compute engine design, multi-level cache hierarchy and a streamlined graphics pipeline. This will also provide the new Radeon RX 5700 series to offer faster clock speeds at lower power. These will also be the first PCIe Gen 4 capable graphics cards.
AMD Radeon RX 5700 lineup was pitted against an RTX 2070 in a video game benchmark of Strange Brigade and was shown to have about 10% lead. AMD Radeon RX 5700 series will be available in July 2019 with more details set to be revealed on June 10. And it will be a multi-GPU launch unlike the earlier Radeon VII launch at CES 2019.
AMD Ryzen 3rd Gen and X570 platforms
The most anticipated announcement was left for the last and that was the AMD 3rd Gen Ryzen Processor family. Built on a 7nm TSMC process node, the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X is an 8-core/16-threaded processor which will still use the AM4 socket but will need the latest X570 platform to make the most of it. That’s not saying that you can’t use the new 3rd Gen Ryzen with the older X370 or X470 platforms. Compared to the Intel Core i7-9700K, the Ryzen 7 3700X was shown to be better by a significant lead. The 3700X scored 4806 points in Cinebench R20 MT run whereas the 9700K did 3276 points. However, this isn’t the top of the line SKU in the mainstream lineup. The 3700X was followed by the Ryzen 7 3800X which has a base clock of 3.9 GHz and a boost clock of 4.5 GHz and is a 105W TDP processor whereas the 3700X was a 65W TDP processor. The 3800X was shown to have a lead of at least 11% and going all the way up to 34% lead in gaming performance when compared to the older gen Ryzen 7 2700X.
However, AMD has even bigger plans with the 3rd Gen Ryzen. AMD announced the Ryzen 9 family of processors with the top SKU being the Ryzen 9 3900X, a 12-core / 24-thread beast of a processor rated for 105W TDP. It has a base clock of 3.8 GHz and a boost clock of 4.6 GHz and uses two chiplets to achieve the high core count. In a Blender benchmark pitting the Ryzen 9 3900X against the Intel Core i9 9920X, the render was completed in 32 seconds on the 3900X as against 38 seconds on the Intel 9920X. It should also be noted that the Intel Core i9-9920X is a 165W TDP processor and the Ryzen 9 3900X beats it in both, single threaded and multi-threaded performance.
AMD 3rd Gen Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 Pricing
The new SKUs are priced as follows: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X for $329 (Rs.22817 approx), Ryzen 7 3800X for $399 (Rs.27,671) and the Ryzen 9 3900X for $499 (Rs.34,607). These are converted USD>INR pricing, we will update the article once we have the proper India specific pricing closer to launch.
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Mithun Mohandas
Mithun Mohandas is an Indian technology journalist with 10 years of experience covering consumer technology. He is currently employed at Digit in the capacity of a Managing Editor. Mithun has a background in Computer Engineering and was an active member of the IEEE during his college days. He has a penchant for digging deep into unravelling what makes a device tick. If there's a transistor in it, Mithun's probably going to rip it apart till he finds it. At Digit, he covers processors, graphics cards, storage media, displays and networking devices aside from anything developer related. As an avid PC gamer, he prefers RTS and FPS titles, and can be quite competitive in a race to the finish line. He only gets consoles for the exclusives. He can be seen playing Valorant, World of Tanks, HITMAN and the occasional Age of Empires or being the voice behind hundreds of Digit videos. View Full Profile
