Leo Says 47 – March 2020 – AMD is Upbeat

As the Human Malware spreads around Planet Earth, Leo is doing his best to remain chirpy. Thankfully we can turn to news from AMD for a healthy portion of sunshine and happiness that will keep us all sane in these dark times.

00:16 Ryzen 9 4900H
01:22 Recap on Covid 19 cancellations and Computex 2020
04:05 Intel as of today
07:23 AMD Financials and El Capitan Supercomputer, and more
12:23 Significant AMD PC Growth
12:45 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen Mobile, RX5000 graphics, Zen 3 and more
14:47 Leading Edge Foundry Process technology, AMD Infinity Architecture and Server CPU Map, AMD Radeon Technology Momentum
17:19 Leo shares some deep thoughts, and rumours on Threadripper, Zen 4 and more
21:01 Next Year – bun fight!

AMD has dished the details on Ryzen 9 4900H Mobile, as covered by Luke HERE

Ryzen 4000 is a monolithic die with Zen 2 CPU architecture and Vega graphics. The spec of Ryzen 9 4900H is similar to Ryzen 7 4800H with a higher CPU clock speed, more graphics cores and a higher graphics clock frequency.

We have to be grateful for that good news as the period since CES in January has involved a great deal of waiting for things to happen, which mostly comes down to the global Human Malware we apparently cannot name on YouTube.

Naturally we want to see AMD Ryzen 4000 laptops. On the Intel front, they launched Ice Lake and Comet Lake U and Y ages ago and we have waited patiently for the gaming laptop 10th Gen chips but so far, nothing but we have to look at the bigger picture

Events such as MWC have been cancelled while other such as GDC and E3 have moved on-line.
Apple has closed all its stores outside China and Nike is also closing stores.
A number of movie premieres have been pushed back including James Bond.
The Vatican has announced the Easter Liturgy will be a digital event i.e. you won’t be able to visit Rome and take part.
MotoGP, Formula 1, rugby and football have all been clobbered and you have to wonder about the 2020 Tokyo Olympics in July and August.
Here in the UK we had local Elections schedule for May that have been pushed back a year to 2021. You have to wonder how the American Elections are going to work with candidates in their 70s meeting the public to shake hands and kiss babies.

We do not currently know what will happen with Computex. The mood is gloomy and the key point is whether Taiwan ROC allows visitors from China PRC

In this new and more serious age we’re going to let some annoying news slip by.
Intel launched the 10th Gen Cascade Lake X HEDT parts back in November but can you buy an 18-core i9-10980XE for the list price of US$979? No, it will cost you £1,299.98 (and it’s not in stock anyway).

If you fancy, the 12-core Core i9-10920X will cost you £709.99 which looks terribly steep.

In the fireside chat between George Davis, CFO of Intel and Joe Moore, Semiconductor Industry Analyst at Morgan Stanley we heard

‘We are definitely in the 10nm era. We launched Ice Lake client sat the end of last year. We have GPUs coming out – a discrete GPU coming out this year… at the end of the year we have the server SKU coming on 10nm. … We also have 10+ coming out this year.’

Thankfully we can turn to AMD for optimism and good news, for example Ryzen 9 3900X has dropped in price.

In somewhat bigger news AMD dished the details on the El Capitan Supercomputer and then we had a three hour AMD Financials briefing that covered a huge range of topics. We used a number of AMD's slides in the video but the highlights are:

AMD is claiming that Zen and Ryzen gives them the:
World’s Fastest 16-core Processor
World’s Fastest High-End Desktop Processors
World’s Fastest Ultrathin Notebook Processor

The Frontier Supercomputer uses AMD EPYC and Radeon Instinct to deliver 1.5 ExaFLOPS of performance while El Capitan uses Next-Generation Zen 4/Genoa EPYCs and a newer version of Radeon Instinct to provide 2 ExaFLOPS of compute power.

The key to Zen 4 looks like 3rd Gen Infinity Fabric which has been named Infinity Architecture and seems to be based on PCI Express 5.

Roadmaps:
Zen 3 on 7nm in late 2020 and early 2021.
Zen 4 on 5nm, seemingly in 2021, but surely for delivery in 2022.
RDNA2 graphics on 7nm in 2020 or 2021.
RDNA3 on ‘Advanced Node’ which might be 7nm EUV in 2021/2022.

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KitGuru says: AMD is providing a massive amount of good news in these uncertain times. 

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