AMD’s next-gen Navi graphics cards confirmed for Q3 2019

AMD has confirmed that it will be launching new Navi graphics cards in the third quarter of this year, along with the first Zen 2 CPU.

This information was revealed in a conference call following the revelation of AMD’s latest financial figures, and of course, many folks are keenly awaiting the arrival of Navi, which is the company’s next-gen 7nm graphics technology.

Exactly which GPUs will be launched wasn’t mentioned, with the only comment being made pertaining to the fact that the Navi cards will carry a lower price tag than the Radeon VII.

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That graphics card is a 7nm product (although still a Vega GPU, not Navi) and weighs in at a retail price of $699 (you can pick it up for around £640 in the UK currently, which is about AU$1,180). So the only thing this makes clear is that there are no high-end Navi models coming in Q3.

That ties in with what we’ve heard previously on the grapevine, with AMD expected to initially launch mid-range Navi GPUs – supposedly Navi 10 – with beefier Navi 20 models to follow in 2020 to compete with Nvidia’s more heavyweight (and seriously pricey) RTX models.

Another interesting point to note here is that previously AMD has strongly hinted that it will be making some big revelations regarding 7nm products at the Computex keynote in May, which we believed meant Navi GPUs as well as 7nm processors – but obviously that’s not the second quarter of 2019, not third.

However, it could be the case that there’s an initial tease or some kind of unveiling at Computex, and what AMD is talking about here is the actual launch of the graphics cards hitting the shelves, which the rumor mill has always insisted will happen in July (which is Q3, of course – with 7/7 being touted as a likely date, referencing 7nm).

So we could still be on for the long-rumored July launch, fingers crossed. Certainly AMD needs to become more competitive in the GPU arena, given that Nvidia is pushing forward with its dominance, and in recent times has released some more affordable Turing GTX (non-ray tracing) graphics cards headed up by the GTX 1660 Ti.

This is the mid-range ground AMD will likely be looking to take back with the new Navi cards.

Rome if you want to…

Furthermore, as we mentioned at the outset, AMD also confirmed that the first Zen 2-based 7nm processor (‘Rome’) will be out in Q3 as well.

These second-generation Epyc chips, which are aimed at servers and heavyweight processing rather than desktop PCs, are already being sampled ahead of the third quarter launch which will see volume production crank up.

As for the consumer-targeted 7nm Ryzen 3000-series CPUs, they weren’t discussed in the conference call, but we’re hoping that we’ll hear something about these at Computex at the end of May, and a July launch has previously been rumored for these chips, too.

Given that they weren’t even mentioned and only second-gen Epyc processors were touched on, is there a possibility that Ryzen 3rd Generation may have slipped a bit from that hoped-for mid-year launch? That’s probably reading too much into this, but it won’t hurt to keep your fingers crossed that this isn’t the case.

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Via Anandtech