AMD to launch next-gen Navi graphics cards at E3 2019

We are all expecting AMD to be announcing all things 7nm during Computex 2019 in the last week of May, but what I've been told my exclusive sources is that AMD might touch on its next-gen Navi GPU at Computex 2019 but will instead do a full announcement at E3 2019.

2

E3 2019 takes place a few weeks after Computex does, with E3 2019 taking place between June 12-14 in LA. AMD launched Radeon RX Vega graphics cards in LA back in 2017 alongside the first-gen Ryzen Threadripper, but unlike Vega... Navi will be a muhc better GPU architecture and from what I'm hearing about performance it'll also be surprising.

E3 2019 is the perfect time to launch t he most exciting card in Radeon history in years, as it's a total gaming-centric event. All eyes can be on Radeon, as Navi will also be powering the two next-gen consoles in the future Xbox and PlayStation 5 families.

The full launch for Navi will be on 7/7 which has been previously rumored, as AMD will be using the number 7 considerably over the coming months since it is the first company to 7nm with CPUs and GPUs and it plans to capitlize on that. It makes total sense and anyone that looks at the situation would agree AMD would be stupid not to use the 7 card throughout its Zen 2 and Navi architectures both deploying on 7nm.

As for performance I've heard that we are looking at it easily beating the Radeon RX Vega 64 and coming close to the RTX 2080, but NVIDIA will continue playing for keeps in the high-end graphics card market with its dominant GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. However, AMD doesn't need to hit that high on the first go so what about Navi 20, the successor to Navi 10 which will replace what we will see announced at E3 2019 and launched on 7/7.

Navi 20 will reportedly not be that much of an upgrade in performance of what is launched on 7/7 with the first-gen Navi graphics card, but this remains to be seen. If AMD can do a little damage with teh first-gen Navi then I can only see improvements from it going forward. But I think we'll see NVIDIA step into the 7nm stage with Ampere in the near future and that will definitely knock some things around.

2

Remember that in 18 months from now we'll be greeted with Intel's first discrete graphics card since the Intel i740 from all those years ago, and surely it will be on 7nm given that Intel has struggled on 10nm for so long now. Navi won't be enough to fight off NVIDIA let alone whatever Intel will have in 18 months so the post-Navi 20 product should be much better as it'll be the second post-GCN architecture from the company.

AMD's first post-GCN architecture is Navi which is where most of the improvements in performance comes from as it is an aging architecture, something Navi really changes up on its first go post-Polaris and Vega. I don't have any GPU-specific details to share other than the news of the launch at E3 2019 and its performance (beats Vega 64 and competes at times with the RTX 2080).

It should be a big deal as it'll be the first time in many, many years that AMD can be boldly proud of its GPU architecture. Polaris was a mid-range offering built for the current-gen Xbox One X and PS4/PS4 Pro while Vega was a write-off if you want to be honest, and built for Apple but never properly used and then chopped into parts (literally) and put out into various APUs by AMD and various Intel CPUs as on-board graphics.

Navi marks the largest change in AMD's GPU architecture in a long time, and for the first time in a while, we should begin to get a little excited. Especially if it's anything like the recent success the CPU division of AMD has gone through with Ryzen, Threadripper, and EPYC courtesy of the Zen CPU architecture.

All eyes are now on Computex 2019 and E3 2019!