50 percent more efficient graphics and 35 percent faster processors.
Reading time 4 minutes
Thursday night, AMD brought in investors and analysts to persuade them to invest in the company. And in this regard, they “raised” plans for future graphics cards and processors.
The company has confirmed, among other things, that the next generation of graphics cards in what will likely be called the Radeon RX 7000 series, as well as the new processors in the Ryzen 7000 series, will be launched before the end of the year. In addition, they revealed new details about their successors once again.
On the graphics front, it has long been known that AMD will release a successor to the current RX 6000 series by the end of the year, and that this will be based on an entirely new architecture called RDNA3. The news is that AMD is sharing how the new architecture will be more than 50 percent more power efficient than the current RDNA2 architecture, which is the basis for the cards in the RX 6000 series.
This is due to both architectural improvements, as well as the fact that RDNA3-based graphics chips are manufactured with a new 5nm production technology, compared to the current 7nm technology. The transition to the new production technology offers benefits for both power consumption and performance, in part because transistors can be stacked close to each other.
In addition, the new design of the graphics chip and its computing hardware, as well as the next generation of Infinity Cache – a lightning-fast memory that uses an AMD card combined with standard GDDR6 video memory – will ensure much higher power efficiency is possible.
AMD also plans to use so-called “chiplets” for the most powerful RDNA3-based cards. Here they connect many smaller pieces to achieve an overall higher performance than they can extract from a single master piece, which has been the norm until now.
It is still not known exactly how much better performance graphics cards that will be based on the RDNA3 architecture will get. It will depend on many of the choices AMD makes, such as how high the graphics chips have to be clocked and how many computing devices they get.
The name hasn’t been confirmed yet, although everyone is expecting the cards in the new series to be called the Radeon RX 7000. The series will anyway compete against new cards from Nvidia, which is also expected to release its own RTX 40 series in a round of 2. Half a year. Several rumors suggest that this will have significantly higher performance than the current RTX 30 series, but will also have a much higher power consumption. Nvidia’s cards will be based on a new architecture called “Ada Lovelace”, which is claimed to have been produced with 5nm technology, down from today’s 8nm.
AMD has also confirmed that another new architecture, which will succeed the RDNA3-based RX 7000 series, is on track to launch by the end of 2024. Little is known about the RDNA4 architecture and its associated graphics card series which will likely be called the RX 8000. Manufactured with another 3nm improved production technology, which in this case will provide significant improvements in energy efficiency, with significantly higher performance potential.
In addition to Nvidia’s challenge in the graphics market, AMD is facing Intel’s competition in the processor market.
Over the past year, Intel has pushed back AMD’s Zen 3 processors in the Ryzen 5000 series. To face the competition, AMD has developed a new processor architecture called Zen 4. This will form the basis for the new processors in the Ryzen 7000 series when they are launched this fall.
AMD claims that the Zen 4 architecture will enable its next processors to execute 8-10 percent more instructions per clock cycle, and that single-core performance in isolation will increase by more than 15 percent compared to current Ryzen 5000 processors. The processors will be built on the basis of a new 5nm production process and, according to AMD, all of this will ensure that they deliver 25 percent higher performance per watt and a 35 percent overall performance improvement over existing Ryzen 5000 processors.
AMD previously stated that its best new processors will remain stable above 5GHz.
The new processors will use a new processor socket called AM5, and will only support DDR5 memory. AMD previously confirmed that you can use your existing AM4 processor cooler on the new base, but you’ll also need to upgrade the motherboard.
Read more about it here.
Additionally, AMD has announced that it will have its own Zen 4-based Ryzen processors with a so-called 3D V-Cache on a somewhat later occasion. AMD has already launched a Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000 processor with 3D V-Cache.
What distinguishes this type of processor from other Ryzen processors is that AMD gave it a “draft” with ultra-fast memory right at the top.
This cache is the cache that the processor prefers because it takes much less time to retrieve data from main memory (RAM).
Games in particular love the extra “memory draft” from AMD, something you can read more about in our Ryzen 7-5800X 3D test.
By the end of 2024, AMD will launch another new series of processors, based on another new architecture called Zen 5. It is scheduled to be manufactured using a 4nm production process. Here, too, separate processors will be launched with additional cache or intermediate storage.
“Web specialist. Lifelong zombie maven. Coffee ninja. Hipster-friendly analyst.”
