AMD Financial Analyst Day Reveals Product Roadmaps and Plans
March 12, 2020
At its Financial Analyst Day, AMD presented detailed roadmaps of its CPU and GPU technology investments, which are designed to deliver leadership products and disruptive solutions to the market.
“Our multi-generational computing and graphics roadmaps are designed to significantly accelerate revenue growth and deliver strong shareholder returns. We are focused on relentlessly executing our leadership IP roadmaps and aggressively introducing advanced technologies to drive sustained market share gains across the large and growing high-performance PC, gaming and data center markets.” -Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO
AMD Advancing Technology Further
Riding on the success of its ‘Zen’ x86 cores Ryzen processors and Epyc processors, AMD plans to release the ‘Zen 3’ core in late 2020. AMD also revealed that the Zen 4 core is on the works and that they are looking to use the advanced 5nm process technology for this.
AMD also announced that its upcoming 3rd Generation AMD Infinity Architecture will see optimized CPU and GPU memory coherency. This means that the CPU and GPU seamlessly and coherently share the same memory to achieve accelerated and improved computing solutions. Along with this, AMD also plans to expand its chipset and die stacking leadership with the new ‘X3D’ packaging that combines chiplets and hybrid 2.5D and 3D die stacking to see a 10x increase in bandwidth density.
Additionally, AMD laid out a strong security portfolio with broadened features for its products at the event. Their recent connection with Confidential Computing Consortium, a group of leading hardware and software companies working to close gaps in data security, sees to improve AMD’s products’ security by protecting data through its entire lifecycle.
Computing and Graphics Update
Even with its steady growth in the PC and gaming markets through its 3rd Generation Ryzen processors and Radeon RX 5000 series graphics cards, AMD is still hellbent to drive continued growth across its products stacks through continuous innovative releases and product updates.
This year, AMD sets its focus on releasing its ‘Zen 3’-based AMD Ryzen products and RDNA 2-based graphics cards. As per AMD, the Zen 3-based Ryzen products offer increased performance to gaming, content creation, and productivity. While its RDNA 2-based ‘Navi 2X’ GPU, on the other hand, is set to deliver exceptional 4K gaming, 50% performance-per-watt improvement over the first-generation RDNA architecture, and hardware-accelerated ray tracing and variable rate shading (VRS).
AMD also laid its plan for its enterprise segment this year, starting off with the new AMD Compute DNA (AMD CDNA). The AMD CDNA, which launches later this year, includes 2nd Generation AMD Infinity Architecture that is set to enhance GPU to GPU connectivity that’s proven to be beneficial for machine learning and high-performance computing applications. Looking forward to the next generation, AMD’s follow-up AMD CDNA 2 will support 3rd Generation AMD Infinity Architecture to enable next-gen exascale-class supercomputers. Completing its exascale systems and machine learning solution, AMD plans to introduce ROCm 4.0, an open-source platform for data centers, later this year.
Furthermore, AMD announced that the El Capitan supercomputer, which is located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is expected to be live in 2023. AMD also expects to see more than 150 AMD EPYC processor-powered cloud instances and 140 server platforms to be available this 2020.
Impact of COVID-19 on AMD
AMD admitted that it expects a modest impact on its revenue from the alarming growth of COVID-19 around the globe. AMD expects the impact in the first quarter potentially resulting in revenue coming in at the lower end of the guidance of approximately $1.8 billion, plus or minus $50 million. Tho, AMD said that its full-year 2020 financial guidance will remain unchanged.