CES 2019:  AMD Showcases New Ryzen and Radeon VII Chips

Building on the astounding success of its Ryzen line of processors and Vega graphics, AMD has shown off two new key product lines at CES 2019. AMD President and CEO Lisa Su introduced the third-gen Ryzen chip as well as the Radeon VII GPU.

Still in pre-production, the third generation of Ryzen chips (code name ‘Matisse’) was pitted against an Intel i9-9900K processor and showed remarkable performance benchmarks with an estimate 30 percent lower power consumption. Based on AMD Zen architecture, the new Ryzen will be the world’s first to support PCIe 4 which will provide a 16 GT/s bit rate, effectively doubling PCIe 3 bandwidth.

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Matisse processors are only expected to hit the market beginning mid-2019, but for those interested, the AMD Radeon VII will be upcoming in just over a month’s time (est. 7th February 2019) starting at $699. AMD Radeon VII will be the first graphics card based on a 7nm process.

AMD CES 2019 - 01
AMD President and CEO Lisa Su showcasing the new 7nm Ryzen ‘Matisse’

Built as on enhanced Vega architecture, this new generation of AMD GPUs are expected to offer double the memory, bandwidth and up to 29 percent higher gaming performance. Content creators can expect to see an upward scale in performance of up to 36 percent.

What to Expect from the AMD Radeon VII

  • Radeon VII cards will feature 60 compute units/3840 stream processors offering speeds as fast as 1.8GHz and will be paired with up to 16GB of ultra-fast HBM2 memory.
  • Memory bandwidth will be increased to 1 TB/s on a 4,096-bit memory interface.
  • Compared to Vega 64, performance improvements of up to 35 percent in Battlefield V10, and up to 42 percent in Strange Brigade.

“AMD Radeon VII is the highest-performance gaming graphics card we ever created,” said Scott Herkelman, corporate vice president and general manager, Radeon Technologies Group at AMD. “It is designed for gamers, creators and enthusiasts who demand ultra-high-quality visuals, uncompromising performance and immersive gaming experiences.”

In the server arena, AMD EPYC processors will also be seeing a new successor based on 7nm technology dubbed ‘Rome’. Single new generation Rome processors are expected to surpass dual Intel Xeon Platinum processors by as much as 15 percent.

On the mobile ground, Ryzen mobile processors will be paired with Vega graphics to power a new generation of high-performance ultrathin notebooks. Devices sporting this potent combination are expected to be seen from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Huawei and Samsung sometime this year.