AMD today announced of high-performance 7nm-based computing and graphics products including the 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen desktop processor family, the AMD X570 chipset for socket AM4 and the 7nm AMD Radeon RX 5700-series.

AMD announced the 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen desktop processor, describing it as "the most advanced desktop processor in the world" with performance across gaming, productivity, and content creation applications. Based on the new “Zen 2” core architecture with AMD chiplet design approach, 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen desktop processors are expected to offer more performance-critical on-die cache than ever before to unleash gaming performance. Additionally, all 3rd Gen Ryzen desktop processors are supported by the world’s first PCIe 4.0 PC readiness for the most advanced motherboards, graphics, and storage technologies available.

With the 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen desktop processor family, AMD introduced a new category of Ryzen 9 desktop processor with the flagship 12 core/24 thread Ryzen 9 3900X. The family is rounded out with 8 core Ryzen 7 models and 6 core Ryzen 5 models.

During the keynote, Dr. Su showed various live demonstrations of the 3rd Gen Ryzen desktop processors versus competitive production parts:

• Ryzen 7 3700X vs. i7-9700K with real-time rendering: The Ryzen 7 3700X offered 1% more single-threaded, and 30% more in multi-threaded performance.
• Ryzen 7 3800X vs. i9-9900K with PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds gameplay: The Ryzen 7 3800X matched the performance of the i9-9900K.
• Ryzen 9 3900X vs. i9-9920X with Blender Render: The Ryzen 9 3900X beat the Intel i9 9920X by more than 16%

AMD claims to offer better single and multi-threaded performance compared to equivalent AMD CPUs. The 12-core part is the fastest, with a boost frequency of 4.6GHz being higher than the next model - the 8-core, 16-thread Ryzen 7 3800X, which also has half the cache at 36MB. Interestingly, the 12-core part would be the one to go for if you want maximum performance in games and thankfully, AMD hasn't seen fit to charge a fortune here either - $499 is the same price as the original Ryzen 7 1800X and clearly a heck of a lot cheaper than the Core i9-9920X.

The Ryzen 7 models both sport 8 cores and 16 threads a piece, sitting at slightly slower frequencies and 105W and 65W TDPs and retail for $399 and $329 respectively. As expected, there are six-core Ryzen 5 parts too, both with 12 threads and slower frequencies than the flagship Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 parts, again with 65W and 95W TDPs. The Ryzen 5 3600 could well prove to be the sweet spot, though, with it set to retail for around $199.

AMD also introduced a new X570 chipset for socket AM4, supporting the world’s first PCIe 4.0 readiness, which exhibited 42% faster storage performance than PCIe 3.0, enabling high-performance graphics card, networking devices, NVMe drives, and more. With PCIe 4.0 doubling the bandwidth for motherboards with the X570 chipset over PCIe 3.0, PC enthusiasts can gain more performance and flexibility when building custom systems. The X570 offers the broadest ecosystem readiness in AMD history, with over 50 new motherboard models anticipated from ASRock, Asus, Colorful, Gigabyte, MSI, as well as PCIe 4.0 storage solutions from AMD's partners including Galaxy, Gigabyte, and Phison. The 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen desktop processors are expected to be available for purchase globally on July 7, 2019.

With the new AMD X570 chipset and AMD Ryzen 3000 series processors, AMD launching Ryzen 3000 Ready. If a new X570, X470 or B450 motherboard is calling your name, just look for the "AMD Ryzen Desktop 3000 Ready" badge on the box to ensure processor drop-in compatibility.

For those looking to update their existing PCs with a new processor, motherboard manufacturers have BIOS updates rolling out now. Check out your motherboard vendor’s website for a list of supported processors so that you can identify which motherboard will support your Ryzen processor of choice.

In addition, OEMs and System Integrators, including Acer, Asus, CyberPowerPC, HP, Lenovo, and MAINGEAR reinforced strong ecosystem support for the new platforms by announcing plans to offer 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen processor-based gaming desktop systems over the coming months.

AMD unveiled RDNA, the next foundational gaming architecture that was designed to drive the future of PC gaming, console, and cloud for years to come. With a new compute unit design, RDNA is expected to deliver incredible performance, power and memory efficiency in a smaller package compared to the previous generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture. It is projected to provide up to 1.25X higher performance-per-clock and up to 1.5X higher performance-per-watt over GCN.

Compared with RX Vega, AMD claims Navi offers 25% better performance per clock and 1.5x performance per watt. The GPU will also be the first PCI-E 4.0-enabled gaming GPU, which ties in with the company's new 3rd Gen Ryzen CPUs and X570 motherboards.

In terms of performance, AMD has said it will be comparing the RX 5700 with Nvidia's RTX 2070 and a live-streamed demo during the keynote today claimed a 10% performance advantage for AMD against the RTX card, which matches some rumors that AMD will be aiming to topple Nvidia's second cheapest RTX Turing card, rather than gunning for the RTX 2080 or RTx 2080 Ti.

RDNA will power the upcoming 7nm AMD Radeon RX 5700-series graphics cards which feature high-speed GDDR6 memory and support for the PCIe 4.0 interface.

During the keynote, Dr. Su showcased the power of RDNA and one of the new AMD Radeon RX 5700-series graphics cards in a head-to-head comparison with a RTX 2070 card running a Strange Brigade gameplay demo, beating the competition delivering ~100 FPS gaming.

AMD Radeon RX 5700-series graphics cards are expected to be available in July 2019.

AMD Datacenter Updates

During the keynote, Dr. Su continued the anticipation around the next-generation AMD EPYC processors with the first public competitive demonstration of a 2nd Gen AMD EPYC server platform. The demonstration showed a 2P 2nd Gen AMD EPYC based server vs. a 2P Intel Xeon 8280-based server running a NAMD Apo1 v2.12 benchmark test. The preproduction 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processor powered server outperformed the Intel Xeon powered servers by more than 2x on the NAMD benchmark.

Finally, Microsoft Azure announced the achievement of previously unobtainable levels of performance for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) using an Azure HB cloud instance running on an 1st Gen AMD EPYC-processor based system. Leveraging the memory bandwidth of AMD EPYC, Azure HB scaled Siemens Star -CCM+ application across over 11,500 cores using a Le Mans 100 Million Cell simulation, well beyond the never before achieved 10,000 cores goal. “HB-series VMs on Azure are a game changer for HPC in the cloud. For the first time, HPC customers can scale their MPI workloads to tens of thousands of cores with the agility of the cloud and performance and economics that rival on-premise cluster,” said Navneet Joneja, head of product for Azure Virtual Machines, Microsoft Corp. “We look forward to this new Azure offering doing great things for HPC-driven innovation and productivity.”

The 2nd Gen AMD EPYC server processor family is projected to deliver up to 2X the performance-per socket and up to 4X the floating performance-per-socket over the previous generation.

The 2nd Gen AMD EPYC server processor family is expected to launch in Q3 2019.