We're nearing the end of what has been quite the wild year for graphics. Initially plagued by an exceedingly frustrating inflation of GPU prices caused by the crypto bubble which had only tapered off to end on an equally frustrating note of a very expensive NVIDIA RTX Turing product lineup.

Well, the crypto bubble has burst, the graphics channel is oversaturated with unsold GPU inventory and we're on the cusp of an entirely new generation of graphics products based on TSMC's leading edge 7nm FinFET process. Suffice to say, 2019 is shaping up to be the polar opposite of what 2018 has been for the discrete graphics market.

NVIDIA Ampere Specs, Performance, Pricing Leaked – Massively Faster Ray Tracing, Higher Clocks, More vRAM & Lower TDP vs. Turing

With 7nm At Hand, AMD is Getting Ready to Tango With NVIDIA's Turing

At least that's what CEO Dr. Lisa Su wants us to believe. Take a listen to what she had to say last week when asked about how the company plans to compete with NVIDIA's new ray tracing focused Turing graphics architecture.

AMD CEO Lisa Su - Nov 27, 2018 - 22nd Annual Credit Suisse Technology, Media & Telecom Conference

"We believe, we will be very competitive overall and that includes the high-end of the GPU market. Obviously there are new products out there from our competition. We will have our set of new products as well and we will be right there in the mix" "As it relates to ray tracing in particular I think it's an important technology, but as with all important technologies it takes time to really have the ecosystem adopt [it]. And we're working very closely with the ecosystem on both hardware and software solutions and expect that ray tracing will be an important element especially as it gets more into the mainstream, frankly, of the market." - Transcripted by Wccftech.com

This builds on Dr. Su's comments at an interview with Barron's a month prior where she asserted that AMD will be “competitive in high-end graphics,” and that AMD is “making high-performing quality products and building a solid long-term foundation.”

And TSMC's 7nm process is key to all of it.

AMD CEO Lisa Su - Q3 2018 Earnings Call "We see significant opportunities to build on this momentum as we transition to our next generations of high performance products and launch the industry's first 7-nanometer x86 CPUs and discrete GPUs over the coming quarters."

It's not yer clear how exactly the company plans to compete with NVIDIA's high-end Turing graphics cards. Especially after all the chatter we've been consistently hearing about AMD's 7nm Navi being a mainstream focused product with GTX 1080 class performance.

AMD Wants to Bring Back the Spirit of its ATi Heydays

The company might in fact be planning to debut its chiplet strategy on the GPU side, especially after it has proven to be so incredibly successful on the CPU side in the form of first generation EPYC, Threadripper and second generation EPYC.

AMD RX 5700 Series Selling Like Hot Cakes, AIB Sales Up 100%+

That, combined with a fresh and immensely enthusiastic general manager at the helm in David Wang means AMD is not ready to throw-in the towel yet. Speaking with pcgamesn.com Wang talked about the olden ATi & NVIDIA days where one would leapfrog the other every other year and how he plans to bring that competitive spirit back.

“That’s how you make this business so exciting, so interesting,” he said. “That’s how you make gamers so excited about new hardware every year. I think somehow we kind of lost that momentum. But what I’m trying to say is we are determined to go back to that cadence, to make this business more fun.”

We certainly hope that David Wang is prepared to walk the walk and not just talk the talk. Not just for the sake of Radeon fans but for the sake of the entire GPU market. A strong and competitive Radeon product lineup means cheaper NVIDIA products for GeForce fans to enjoy as well.

Wccftech GeForce 10 Series Tesla V100 GeForce 20/11 Series AMD 400 Series AMD 500 Series AMD 600 Series Architecture Pascal Volta Turing Polaris Polaris / Vega Navi Process Node TSMC 16nm FF TSMC 12nm FF TSMC 12nm FF Samsung 14nm LPP Samsung 14nm LPP TSMC 7nm FinFET Memory GDDR5/X HBM2 GDDR6 GDDR5 GDDR5 / HBM2 GDDR6/HBM2 Year 2016 2017 2018 2016 2017 2019 GPUs GP102, GP104, GP106, GP107 GV110 TU102, TU104, TU106, TU107 Polaris 10, Polaris 11 Polaris 20, Polaris 21, Vega 10, Vega 11 Navi 10, Navi 11

(Navi Chiplet?)