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AMD's Zen 2 CPUs will launch before Navi GPUs
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13909/ces-2019-amd-ceo-dr-lisa-su
The exact quote is:
"So with Radeon 7, very quickly you'll see it on shelf in February. I think the next big thing is our 3rd Generation Ryzen. I know there's a lot of anticipation about that. You know the key point is the part looks good. The part looks really good, and we'll put it out sometime in the middle of the year. We haven't decided the exact month yet, there's a little bit more tuning to be done."
So basically, third generation Ryzen with Zen 2 cores on a TSMC 7 nm process node will launch around the middle of this year. That's going to be AMD's next major launch after the Radeon VII.
She also said that AMD will talk more about Navi and the next Threadripper later this year. That's not a promise of a launch later this year, though it would certainly be disappointing if they don't launch this year.
Also, she didn't quite confirm 16 CPU cores in socket AM4, but did come pretty close:
"Ok, alright, so there is some extra room on that package and I think you might expect that we will have more than 8 cores. I didn't say how many more...I said more."
Considering that their base CPU chiplet has 8 cores, two chiplets gets you to 16. Of course, the picture of the part she showed off certainly led people to expect that.
The exact quote is:
"So with Radeon 7, very quickly you'll see it on shelf in February. I think the next big thing is our 3rd Generation Ryzen. I know there's a lot of anticipation about that. You know the key point is the part looks good. The part looks really good, and we'll put it out sometime in the middle of the year. We haven't decided the exact month yet, there's a little bit more tuning to be done."
So basically, third generation Ryzen with Zen 2 cores on a TSMC 7 nm process node will launch around the middle of this year. That's going to be AMD's next major launch after the Radeon VII.
She also said that AMD will talk more about Navi and the next Threadripper later this year. That's not a promise of a launch later this year, though it would certainly be disappointing if they don't launch this year.
Also, she didn't quite confirm 16 CPU cores in socket AM4, but did come pretty close:
"Ok, alright, so there is some extra room on that package and I think you might expect that we will have more than 8 cores. I didn't say how many more...I said more."
Considering that their base CPU chiplet has 8 cores, two chiplets gets you to 16. Of course, the picture of the part she showed off certainly led people to expect that.
Comments
With the socket size being what it is, they probably can't go over 16 cores on Socket AM4. But they could probably make a 64 core Threadripper if they want to. That might be a kind of dumb part for lack of memory bandwidth, though.
They certainly could use salvage parts that have some of the cores disabled. But I'd expect that to be more for mainstream consumer parts where you only have 4 or 6 or whatever cores enabled in the package in total.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
If you were to buy a new computer, you'd likely benefit more from the new cores being faster than from having more of them. But anything modern has faster cores, at least apart from Intel's Atom cores and the new Excavator-based CPU that AMD is launching for Chromebooks.
Intel and AMD both price their CPUs such that the CPU with more cores also has a higher max turbo, at least up to the point at which that becomes hard to do. Thus, unless you want to roll the dice on overclocking, the way to get the fastest cores is also to get a lot of them--at least eight, and probably going up in the future.
There's also a price/performance argument that, even if you don't think that six cores will give you that much benefit over four, it doesn't cost that much to get a six-core CPU, either. A Ryzen 5 2600 currently costs $165 on New Egg, and if that's your budget, I'd take that over any quad core that you could get for that price unless you need an integrated GPU.
Eight cores is a bit of a tougher sell for gaming at the moment, and ten or more much harder to justify. But that will change in coming years, due as much to die shrinks making it ever easier to pack in more cores at an affordable price as to anything that will change in software.