AMD yesterday released their Ryzen PRO Ecosystem. During the briefing AMD also has shown a couple of interesting slides I wanted to run you through, they involve Threadripper Zen+, but also 7nm products.

So the first slide we've already seen yesterday, it involves the Ryzen Zen+ update that will be brought towards Threadripper, the public slide from AMD now re-confirms that Ryzen Threadripper 2900X, 2920X and 2950X are sampling.

As mentioned yesterday, with Threadripper Gen2 you can expect a refresh of the current line-up; an 8-core Threadripper 2900X, a 12-core Threadripper 2920X and of course a 16-core Threadripper 2950X. AMD will apply the same Zen+ tweaks to the processors; including memory latency optimizations and higher clock speeds. This is going to be big for Threadripper. I expect an announcement at Computex and an initial launch in the Summer.

In another slide, AMD shows the processor architecture progression of 14nm Ryzen ZEN (Summit Ridge), towards 12nm Zen+ (Pinnacle Ridge). However, in the slide, AMD also refers towards the upcoming 7nm architectures. If each step is a year then in 2019 AMD seems to be on track and ready with 7nm ZEN2, as the slide states .. the design is complete and thus finished, and would improve on Zen in multiple segments. Followed by that, and look at it from a bit of a tick-tock perspective, will be Zen3 in 2020. AMD here only states that it is on track.

For the last slide, we move towards graphics processors. AMD mentions 14nm Vega, and if you follow the timeline you're looking at a 7nm Vega next year in 2019. Word is that it is a die-shrink of the current design and thus the card would get the same 64 CUs / 4096 shader processors as in Vega 10 (the current one), who knows for sure really. In 2019 NAVI will make its appearance, which again is fabbed on 7nm (7LP) nodes, and then in 2020 is a GPU planned on an optimized 7nm+ node, it has no codename other than being labeled next-gen, indicative for the next new architecture. It's clear that everything on AMDs roadmap is aiming at 7nm production.

“Thanks to additional improvements at both the transistor and process levels, the 7LP technology is exceeding initial performance targets and expected to deliver greater than 40 percent more processing power and twice the area scaling than the previous 14nm FinFET technology,” was stated by GlobalFoundries back in last year, mid-June.





