AMD showcases Navi-based Radeon RX 5700 and Ryzen 3000 CPUs – The INQUIRER

AFTER MONTHS OF ONLINE CHATTER, AMD has revealed its Navi next-gen graphics and third-generation Ryzen processors.

We’ve known for a while that Team Red was going to show off new GPUs and CPUs at Computex 2019. And that’s exactly what Dr Lisa Su and pals did on Monday. 

Let’s start with Navi. AMD showed off the Radeon RX 5700 graphics card as the first in the Navi family; it’s built on a new 7-nanometre foundation architecture called RDNA, offering a step up in efficiency and performance compared to the rather long-in-the-tooth Graphics Core Next (GCN), according to AMD.

As such, Navi is expected to deliver a 1.25 times higher performance-per-clock and 1.5 times higher performance-per-watt.

The Radeon RX 5700 will make use of GDDR6 video memory and support the PCIe 4.0 interface; no surprises there. But Dr Su touted the card as one that can beat Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2070, the third highest performing graphics card in the RTX line up, by some 10 per cent in the Strange Brigade third-person action adventure game.

We’ll have to take these performance figures with a pinch of salt given it was an onstage demos, so the RX 5700 might lag behind its equivalent Nvidia rival in other benchmarks.

There wasn’t much else revealed in terms on performance metrics, but we’re causally optimistic that AMD might have a bit of a proper mid-range to high-end GPU here that’ll challenge Nvidia in the same arena.

Slated for a July release date, we expect to hear more about the Radeon RX 5700’s gaming chops and other next-gen Radeon cards at E3 2019.

Next up is AMD’s third-generation Ryzen CPUs. There are a good few of these so see the chart below, but the processors start with the Ryzen 5 3600, a six-core, 12-thread processor running from 2.6GHz to 4.2GHz, to the 12-core, 23-thread Ryzen 9 3900X.

The latter is a part targeted at PC gamers, offering both single and multi-threaded performance that will apparently beat Intel’s expensive Core i9-9920X. The latter chip has a price tag of $1.199 (around £946), while the new Ryzen 9 CPU will set buyers back $499 (some £393) when the CPU goes on sale 7 July.

The rest of the third-gen Ryzen processors (above) come with eight and six core configurations and prices that range from $199 to $399 and will be released in July.

If these Ryzen processors can compete with Intel CPUs when it comes to instructions per clock and performance in single-threaded applications, then AMD could be onto a winner here. And that should kick Intel up the jacksie to knock out some impressive processors in response. µ