During AMD’s Financial Analyst Day early this month, the semiconductor company detailed its plans for its next phase of growth driven by multi-generational high-performance CPU and GPU roadmaps and aggressive technology investments designed to deliver leadership products and disruptive solutions.
To ensure that the company’s success which came from the shipment of more than 260 million Zen x86 cores in the AMD Ryzen and AMD EPYC processors to continue, AMD will soon be introducing the first processors based on its next-generation Zen 3 core in late 2020. The “Zen 4” core is currently in design and is targeted to use advanced 5nm process technology.
During the event, AMD unveiled plans to expand its chiplet and die stacking segment with the new X3D packaging that combines chiplets and hybrid 2.5D and 3D die stacking to deliver more than a 10x increase in bandwidth density.
Have you read “IDC: PC shipments grow 2.7% in 2019, ending 7-year decline”?
For the upcoming 3rd Generation AMD Infinity Architecture, it will come with optimized CPU and GPU memory coherency that can enable significant performance improvements and simplify the software programming required for accelerated computing solutions by allowing the CPU and GPU to seamlessly and coherently share the same memory.
AMD security portfolio
On the security front, AMD is building on its product portfolio with expanded features. The company joined the Confidential Computing Consortium, a group of leading hardware and software companies working to close gaps to protect data through its entire lifecycle.
“Our multi-generational computing and graphics roadmaps are designed to significantly accelerate revenue growth and deliver strong shareholder returns,” said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. “We are focused on relentlessly executing our leadership IP roadmaps and aggressively introducing advanced technologies to drive sustained market share gains across the large and growing high-performance PC, gaming and data center markets.”
GPU workloads
To address the growing number and diversity of GPU workloads, AMD announced a multi-generational roadmap to deliver two optimized graphics architectures for gaming and data center computing markets:
The AMD Radeon DNA (AMD RDNA) architecture was designed for gaming and is currently powering the award-winning AMD Radeon™ RX 5000 series GPUs. The next-generation AMD RDNA 2 architecture is planned to deliver a 50% performance-per-watt improvement over the first-generation AMD RDNA architecture. It will support hardware-accelerated ray tracing, variable rate shading (VRS) and other advanced features. The first AMD RDNA 2-based products are expected to launch in late 2020.
AMD unveiled its new AMD Compute DNA (AMD CDNA) architecture, designed to accelerate data center compute workloads. The first-generation AMD CDNA architecture, planned to launch later this year, includes 2nd Generation AMD Infinity Architecture to enhance GPU to GPU connectivity and is optimized for machine learning and high-performance computing applications. The follow-up AMD CDNA 2 architecture will support 3rd Generation AMD Infinity Architecture to enable next generation exascale-class supercomputers.
Expanding on previous generations of the ROCm open-source software platform for the data center, AMD plans to introduce ROCm 4.0 later this year as a complete software solution for high-performance computing exascale systems and machine learning workloads.
AMD will also be coming up with the exascale computing with its CPU, GPU, interconnects and software products, including the recently announced El Capitan supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Expected to come online in 2023, El Capitan is expected to deliver more than 2 exaFLOPs of double-precision performance, making it more powerful than today’s 200 fastest supercomputers combined.
AMD is continuing to gain traction with its 2nd Generation AMD EPYC processors in enterprise, cloud and HPC markets based on delivering performance leadership and TCO advantages across the most important enterprise and cloud workloads. In 2020 we expect more than 150 AMD EPYC processor-powered cloud instances and 140 server platforms to be available.
AMD is unlocking accelerated computing with new technologies including AMD CDNA architecture, 3rd Generation Infinity Architecture and the ROCm 4.0 software platform, all of which will support the AMD-powered Frontier and El Capitan supercomputers.
Computing, graphics
In the gaming segment, AMD partners with other brands to bring AMD Radeon graphics to more than 500 million gamers on the most popular devices, with the opportunity to address 2.5 billion gamers worldwide. With Microsoft and Sony, AMD has established long-term relationships to continue market leadership as the number one silicon provider for game consoles.
Moving forward, AMD sees significant opportunities to drive continued growth across its computing and graphics portfolio where it expects to grow its performance leadership with the ramp of its 7nm Zen 2-based 3rd Generation AMD Ryzen processors designed specifically for desktops and notebooks across the consumer and commercial segments. Built to optimize the user experience in these markets, the newest AMD Ryzen processors deliver outstanding performance, responsiveness, battery-life and security features for the most demanding workloads. AMD is on track to bring increased performance to the gaming, content creation and productivity markets when it delivers the first “Zen 3”-based AMD Ryzen™ product in 2020.
The company also plans to deliver a full-stack of high-performance, AMD RDNA architecture-powered graphics products to further expand the AMD Radeon install base. Extending the outstanding performance of the Radeon RX 5000 series, AMD RDNA 2-based Navi 2X GPUs will bring uncompromised 4K gaming, new features including hardware-based ray tracing support and a significant performance uplift.