AMD Expands Lineup of Mobile Ryzen, Vega Chips

AMD HAS ANNOUNCED that it’s second-generation Ryzen desktop CPUs will launch in April.

Meanwhile, Navi, the follow-on graphics architecture to Vega, will be produced with 7-nanometer circuitry, and AMD’s follow-on “Next-Gen” graphics architecture is expected to go into production with a 7-nanometer-plus process. The chip designer wants to sustain that momentum through 2018 and its kicking off CES with a wide range of announcements.

Don’t expect any extra cores being squeezed into the new Ryzen 2 family, however. AMD is also making Ryzen Pro Mobile Processors with Radeon Vega Graphics for the commercial, enterprise, and public sector markets. Keep in mind, what AMD and GlobalFoundries are calling 12nm is better understood as a refinement and improvement of GF’s existing 14nm technology. The new Ryzen 2000 series Pinnacle Ridge chips will feature the new Zen+ architecture and use the 12nm production process, and they’re already sampling out to manufacturers. AMD says the design is complete and it will “improve on the award-winning Zen design in multiple dimensions”.

Same with Zen 2 aka Starship. Considering some of the early growing pains with the AM4 platform, the new chipset may help to further improve performance, stability, and features. Given that they also said that Zen 3, the “7nm+” design to follow that one, is “on track” for 2020, it seems fair to assume that we will see Zen 2 next year around this time. With Ryzen 5 Pro you’ll see four cores and eight threads, a maximum boost speed of 3.6 GHz, and eight CUs; Ryzen 3 will deliver four cores and four threads, a top boost speed of 3.4GHz, and six CUs. The $169 Ryzen 5 2400G will offer much better graphics performance than the $30 more expensive Core i5-8400 (based on current pricing) and has equivalent performance to the $100+ higher Core i5-8400 and NVIDIA GT 1030 discrete solution. Tonight, AMD revealed official plans for the coming year’s roadmaps, which include a couple of surprises.

In terms of specs, the Ryzen 5 2400G with Radeon Vega Graphics is outfitted with 4 CPU cores, 8 threads, and a boost clock of 3.9GHz.

Below is AMD’s roadmap for Zen desktop processors. A new Radeon Instinct MI25 accelerator for machine learning applications will be AMD’s first 7nm chip. There’s no word of any down-market Vega introductions that would push it into Polaris’ territory, and it’s not clear if AMD will bring its 7nm Vega to market as a consumer product. Most of the improvements to the 400-series chipsets involve better memory support and greater scope for overclocking, at least from what AMD has said so far. For those of you who like the AMD Wraith CPU coolers, the Wraith Prism was also shown off, with its direct contact heat pipes, switchable overclock fan profile, rainbow RGB ring, illuminated fan blades and “dark mode for RGB heathens”. OK that was lame, we admit it, but there isn’t anything more interesting to talk about on the Vega roadmap front.

AMD roared back in 2017, first on the desktop, with its new line of Ryzen processors based on its Zen microarchitecture, and then toward the end of the year on mobile, when the first notebooks appeared using Ryzen Mobile chips.