AMD has made a number of announcements related to its research and development efforts, and has publicly disclosed brand new roadmap updates at its Financial Analyst Day event. While light on product-specific news, we now know a lot about how the next few generations of CPUs and GPUs will shape up, and how AMD plans to gain market share in the important enterprise and data centre markets. AMD has had a very good run over the past three years, mostly thanks to the brand new Zen CPU architecture which came after nearly a decade of struggling to be competitive. The company announced growing revenue, increased profitability, and significant market share gains.
Describing AMD's[1] "multi-generational" graphics and compute roadmaps, CEO Dr Lisa Su[2] outlined the company's corporate strategy and recapped successes across the client, cloud, gaming, and supercomputing spaces in recent years. AMD has so far shipped over 260 million Zen cores[3] across its Ryzen[4], Threadripper[5], and Epyc[6] processors since they debuted in 2017[7]. For desktop users, new CPUs codenamed 'Vermeer' based on the Zen 3 architecture, will launch this year and in 2021, depending on market segment, as expected.
The next generation of Epyc processors, based on the Zen 3 architecture and codenamed 'Milan', are expected to be launched in late 2020. AMD also announced that work on the subsequent Epyc 'Genoa' generation based on Zen 4 cores is progressing, and these CPUs are expected to be manufactured on a new 5nm process, to hit the market by 2022.
AMD's scalable Infinity Fabric interconnect, which has allowed for an efficient modular chiplet-based design[8], is now known as Infinity Architecture. The third generation will optimise coherent...