AMD's CES announcements

[sck451]

At long last we've had AMD's announcements of their new CPUs.

AMD Teases 5nm Ryzen 7000 ‘Raphael’ Zen 4 CPUs, Unveils Ryzen 7 5800X3D with 96MB of L3 Cache

Firing back at Alder Lake

www.tomshardware.com

The big news:

• The "Zen 3D" refresh will include just a single chip, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with an extraordinary 96MB of L3 cache, coming this spring. Supposedly it will outperform the 12900K in gaming. Congratulations, Intel: it was nice that you had your crown back for, what, two months?
• There will be a Ryzen 6000 "Rembrandt" series of mobile chips, but not desktop, coming from February (though I think these promises always fail with notebooks). These will be the full Zen 3+ architecture (migrated from 7nm to 6nm) with DDR5 and RDNA graphics. They will be far and away the best iGPUs to exist, perhaps approaching 1060 performance. (Also, they'll be the first AMD mobile chips to support PCIe 4.0.)
• Ryzen 7000 "Raphael" is coming later this year, with a new LGA socket, a weird IHS, DDR5, PCIe 5.0, and compatibility with AM4 coolers, all built on a 5nm manufacturing process. These will apparently be the first AMD chips to exceed 5GHz in regular use.

I don't know about you, but it feels like 2020 all over again with all this! A properly exciting time for CPU technology.

 

[TonyCarter]

I'm glad I'm sorted for a few years, and not waiting for the 'next big thing' anymore

 

[SpyderTracks]

At long last we've had AMD's announcements of their new CPUs.

AMD Teases 5nm Ryzen 7000 ‘Raphael’ Zen 4 CPUs, Unveils Ryzen 7 5800X3D with 96MB of L3 Cache

Firing back at Alder Lake

www.tomshardware.com

The big news:

• The "Zen 3D" refresh will include just a single chip, the Ryzen 7 5800X3D with an extraordinary 96MB of L3 cache, coming this spring. Supposedly it will outperform the 12900K in gaming. Congratulations, Intel: it was nice that you had your crown back for, what, two months?
• There will be a Ryzen 6000 "Rembrandt" series of mobile chips, but not desktop, coming from February (though I think these promises always fail with notebooks). These will be the full Zen 3+ architecture (migrated from 7nm to 6nm) with DDR5 and RDNA graphics. They will be far and away the best iGPUs to exist, perhaps approaching 1060 performance. (Also, they'll be the first AMD mobile chips to support PCIe 4.0.)
• Ryzen 7000 "Raphael" is coming later this year, with a new LGA socket, a weird IHS, DDR5, PCIe 5.0, and compatibility with AM4 coolers, all built on a 5nm manufacturing process. These will apparently be the first AMD chips to exceed 5GHz in regular use.

I don't know about you, but it feels like 2020 all over again with all this! A properly exciting time for CPU technology.

I was certainly underwhelmed by this, I expected 3 CPU's, 5900x, 5800x and 5600x in the 3D versions.

It will be interesting to see real world performance of the 5800x 3D, if it does in fact overtake Intel that will be quite impressive, just a shame they didn't have a wider spread of options.

I'm guessing silicon shortage had a lot to do with the limited selection.

The mobile space though looks promising and I'm really excited to see what comes out from that.

Ryzen 7000 is going to be awesome, that's when I'm going to upgrade I think, although I'm sure stocks and prices will still be ludicrous.

But the software based performance I was also very interested in is the Radeon FXR which is essentially DLSS but all driven by software, and the game doesn't need to be specifically encoded that way, it will work on any game. No doubt it won't be as effective or superior to DLSS, but it's a great option for those older games that are never going to be rewritten, and great for Indie devs who may not have that particular skillset or money to invest. As well as those on non current gen cards of course.

AMD’s new Radeon Super Resolution software promises to bring AI super-sampling to almost any game

There’s also a new eye-tracking security feature.

www.theverge.com

 

[DarTon]

Very underwhelming on the desktop CPUs with V cache. AMD did better with the 6000 series mobile chips. Plus they seem to be back on track for a late 22 launch of the AM5 based 7000 series. Fear was that would slip into early 23.

Problem is that versus Intel, it looks a bit weak. Intel have launched 22 more affordable mainstream Alder-Lake S CPUs at CES, plus the cheaper B660 motherboards. Something like the 12400 at say $175-200 + B660 board makes the 5600X systems look expensive. Not clear the 6000 series chips will be able to compete in CPU terms will the Alder-Lake S but will hold advantage in iGPU terms.

Just feels AMD is fine on the development front but really struggling on the capacity front. They are too dependent on TSMC and have to pick and choose where they deploy that limited foundry capacity. Seems the V-cache refresh wasn't high enough on that priority list.

 

[Scott]

I think AMD have deliberately taken a breather. My guess is that they don't feel the need to go whole hog with the desktop launch based on how badly Intel actually burned themselves.

I could be completely wrong but it feels like they are letting the current gen deliberately slip in order to go all out with the next gen, and reduce the chances of slipping the 2022 date.

 

[SpyderTracks]

Very underwhelming on the desktop CPUs with V cache. AMD did better with the 6000 series mobile chips. Plus they seem to be back on track for a late 22 launch of the AM5 based 7000 series. Fear was that would slip into early 23.

Problem is that versus Intel, it looks a bit weak. Intel have launched 22 more affordable mainstream Alder-Lake S CPUs at CES, plus the cheaper B660 motherboards. Something like the 12400 at say $175-200 + B660 board makes the 5600X systems look expensive. Not clear the 6000 series chips will be able to compete in CPU terms will the Alder-Lake S but will hold advantage in iGPU terms.

Just feels AMD is fine on the development front but really struggling on the capacity front. They are too dependent on TSMC and have to pick and choose where they deploy that limited foundry capacity. Seems the V-cache refresh wasn't high enough on that priority list.

AMD have also done a deal with GlobalFoundaroes for silicon, weather that chiplets or other I'm unsure, but it's positive

Amended deal leads AMD to acquire $2.1 billion worth of wafers from GlobalFoundries

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.O) has amended their agreement with GlobalFoundries and will be acquiring $2.1 billion worth of silicon wafers from them. In

www.techzine.eu

 

[sck451]

Yeah, I agree that fab capacity is likely the reason not to go all-in on 5000-series 3D refresh. Use that capacity for making shedloads of 7000-series chips instead. Moreover, it sounds like the 3D thing is quite complex, so from that perspective the 5800X is the obvious chip to refresh as it only uses one CCD, unlike the two CCDs on the 5900X and 5950X.

With Intel, if B660 comes out trumps, they will own the middle pricing tier, to go along with their dominance at the low end and their lead in the top end. But B560 was a horror show: it'll be interesting to see if this series of motherboards is less disastrous. The Hardware Unboxed review wasn't terribly promising: it seems like a very complex picture in terms of what motherboard enables what performance.

 

[bigmaraippo]

For gaming what does this mean?

For us who've recently got into the AM4 CPU's and x570 Motherboards, how will this affect us in the next few years?

 

[sck451]

For gaming what does this mean?

Probably better performance if you buy one of these new chips.

For us who've recently got into the AM4 CPU's and x570 Motherboards, how will this affect us in the next few years?

You could conceivably upgrade to the 5800X3D, but not to the new AM5/Zen 4 CPUs. It will be the last (significant) chip released on the AM4 X570 platform. That shouldn't be a problem: Ryzen 5000 chips will still be really strong performers for some time to come and will happily handle graphics card updates without bottlenecking them in most scenarios. You may even find yourself able to upgrade to a higher tier of AM4 CPU on the cheap: I'm hoping that second-hand (or even new) 5900Xs are reduced in price significantly later this year so I can upgrade my 5600X to one of them. But we'll see about that.

It's certainly not a reason to worry about the longeivity of your build!

 

[SpyderTracks]

For gaming what does this mean?

For us who've recently got into the AM4 CPU's and x570 Motherboards, how will this affect us in the next few years?

You wont need to update a properly configured platform for the life of the PC.