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

[Tsing]

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...

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[Brian_B]

They don't even have an entire generation out.

Of course, I guess this isn't all that unusual, weren't the first Maxwell cards some low tier and mobile parts, and then the Maxwell refresh brought out the 900 series in earnest?

 

[SmokeRngs]

They don't even have an entire generation out.

Of course, I guess this isn't all that unusual, weren't the first Maxwell cards some low tier and mobile parts, and then the Maxwell refresh brought out the 900 series in earnest?

I've said it before and I'll say it again. It's highly likely they knew as soon as the 5700 was taped out that there was not going to be anything higher tier than that. Assuming perfect scaling it would take a literal double of the 5700XT to equal or beat nVidia high end and the power consumption would be way too high. They knew it was going to take a more advanced node process and/or a rework of the architecture itself.

It's absolutely no surprise that we're not seeing anything higher than the 5700XT on the original RDNA. It wasn't going to scale well enough to go any higher so they waited until RDNA2 was done before bringing out anything better. AMD may have even known well before what was going to happen and put out 5500-5700 with the initial architecture because they could and because they needed the advancement and cash. It also wasn't going to hurt to get it out there to see how the architecture worked in the real world as well as maturing the drivers. Basically, RDNA may have been a stopgap until they could put out RDNA2.

 

[magoo]

CEOs are really good at saying something without saying anything.