Presentation of the Radeon VII and announcement of the Ryzen 3000
AMD's latest graphics card will be released on 7 February and is expected to match the performance of NVIDIA's RTX 2080. AMD also took the opportunity to give us a sneak preview of the Ryzen 3000, also known as the Matisse.
A leak concerning the Ryzen 3000 had already made the rounds in the media in December 2018. According to the info relayed by the leak, the new CPU should offer a frequency of 5.1 Ghz and have up to 16 cores. AMD's CES presentation is over and the rumours have not been confirmed. All we know is that Matisse will be released soon.
The new processors should see the light of day by mid-2019. The Ryzen 3000 series based on the Zen 2 architecture, etched in 7nm by TSMC. The new CPUs are expected to offer better clock speeds and energy efficiency than their Zen+ series predecessors. At the presentation, AMD showed a CPU consisting of a small 7nm chip with eight cores and 16 threads, as well as a larger I/O chip etched in 14nm.
This CPU allows the Santa Clara manufacturer to compete with Intel's i9-9900K processor in Cinebench R15 (Multithreaded). The two processors achieved similar results: with the Ryzen 3000 scoring 2057 points, compared with 2040 points for the i9-9900K. On the other hand, the Ryzen 3000 system was ahead in terms of energy consumption, with 130 Watts, compared with 180 Watts for the Intel processor. However, Cinebench R15 gave no indication of gaming performance, and in any case the results communicated during the presentations should be treated with caution. We'll know more by mid-2019.
We can, however, already note a feature that is sure to please: the Ryzen 3000 series will be able to accommodate up to 16 cores. On the model shown, there was even room for a second chip. Matisse is also integrating a PCIe root controller compatible with the 4.0 standard. Ryzen 3000 CPUs are also expected to run on AM4 300 and 400 series motherboards.
Radeon VII: faster than the RTX 2080
The highlight of AMD's presentation, however, was the Radeon VII GPU aimed at gamers. The first consumer graphics card to be engraved in 7nm, it has 60 computing units, i.e. 3840 cores, clocked at 1.8GHz. When it comes to video memory, AMD has not followed in NVIDIA's footsteps. Instead of sticking to the same capacity as its predecessor, AMD has equipped its new GPU with 16 GB of HBM2 memory with a transfer rate of 1 TB/s. The Radeon VII is said to be 25% faster than the Vega 64 for content creation.
The performance improvement is even more impressive for gaming, depending on the DirectX or Vulkan version. For example, the GPU should be 35% faster on "Battlefield 5" (DirectX 12). We don't know exactly what configuration AMD used to obtain these results. And as always, information provided by manufacturers should be taken with a grain of salt. Compared to the RTX 2080, the Radeon VII has a very slight lead on "Battlefield 5" (DirectX12) and "Far Cry 5" (DirectX 11), but would be around 20% faster on "Strange Brigade" (Vulkan).
The card will be available from February 7 for US$700, excluding tax. My colleague Jan Heidenreich will be sure to let you know as soon as he finds out more about its availability here. The price set by AMD is relatively high. The Founders Edition of the RTX 2080 may have cost $100 more at launch, but it already offered ray tracing and DLSS. The Radeon VII offers nothing comparable.
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