AMD Big Navi

After some important CES 2020 public announcements, AMD invited ‘a small number of press’ for a round of questions with Lisa Su, AMD’s CEO and President. Multiple questions were asked, but the most important one was about Big Navi. A transcript of the whole session was published by AnandTech.

Lisa Su in January 2020 at CES 2020:

Gordon Ung, PC World: Do you think that AMD has to have a high-end competitor in the discrete graphics market? LS: [laughs] I know those on Reddit want a high end Navi! You should expect that we will have a high-end Navi, and that it is important to have it. The discrete graphics market, especially at the high end, is very important to us. So you should expect that we will have a high-end Navi, although I don’t usually comment on unannounced products.

Lisa Su in August 2019 during the second-quarter earnings call (story):

Q: Can you give us a sense on 7nm high-end NAVI and mobile 7nm CPUs A: You asked a good product question. I would say they are coming. You should expect that our execution on those are on track and we have a rich 7nm portfolio beyond the products that we have already announced in the upcoming quarters.

What board partners have say (anonymously)

We have spoken to board partners about Big Navi and they are very enthusiastic about 2020 in general. Based on what they heard from AMD, next-gen RDNA (which could either be RDNA+ or RDNA2) is more power-efficient than RDNA1. They do not have any specific information to share, such as die sizes or compute unit counts, but they are sure it will be on par if not better than the current high-end RTX series.

Their biggest concern is the arrival of the 7nm RTX 30 series, as they simply do not know what to expect. The sooner Big Navi drops, the better.

No specific date was given, but they expect Big Navi to be shown either in June (at Computex) or July (a year after RX 5700). One would guess we are expecting an RX 6000 series graphics card at that point.

Source: AnandTech