AMD, Intel and Nvidia in 2019: A Retrospective

What new processors for PCs await us in 2019?

The past year has been pretty strange in the world of PC components. AMD, Intel, and Nvidia have released major product lines that have helped control potential market segments – at least for a while.

AMD released Ryzen and Threadripper 2 processors^nd Generation, which offered fantastic performance at a low price, while Nvidia released Turing and the best graphics cards we’ve ever seen. And Intel? Well, Intel has released four different microarchitectures with varying degrees of success.

And what will 2019 look like? Since all of these manufacturers are targeting a more efficient chip than ever before, can we get 7nm processors mainstream? Or will AMD release a line of graphics cards that will keep the RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti from making Nvidia money? What will mid-tier and low-end Nvidia Turing graphics cards look like?

| AMD IN 2019

Over the years, AMD has been playing the underdog in the graphics card market and in the market for the best processors.

However, now that AMD sells twice as many processors as Intel, it is entering the new year as the dominant force in the market – even if the company has to catch up with Nvidia.

Ryzen 3rd Generation… AMD Ryzen 3000 Series processors are a solid bet for 2019, and while the leaks point us to 16-core monsters clocked at 4.7GHz, we think those are too steep claims. That said, AMD will cut the process down to 7nm in 2019, according to leaked Informatica Cero roadmaps, so we’re likely to see efficiency and performance gains across the board – hopefully AMD can maintain a great balance between price and performance.

3rd generation Threadripper… Since this has become the norm in the last couple of years, we’ll likely see the new Threadripper HEDT series of processors in the summer of 2019. The leak we mentioned earlier points to a “Castle Peak” architecture after 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen, likely based on the same Zen 2 process as Ryzen 3rd Gen. As with the mainstream Ryzen platform, we expect AMD’s next line of HEDT to deliver efficiency and performance improvements.

AMD Vega 7nm… AMD is preparing a press conference for CES 2019, and we are confident the company is about to unveil 7nm Vega graphics cards for artists and digital professionals. We’ve already seen AMD Tease (7nm) graphics cards for CES and the AMD Vega II logo has been spotted in the trademark app. It’s safe to say that AMD Vega II is coming very soon.

AMD Navi… What do we have on consumer video cards? Ever since Nvidia launched Turing at frankly insane prices, we’ve been counting on AMD Navi to take the stage and impose some much-needed competition on Team Green. We have found a leak that suggests AMD will release an RX 3080 that will compete with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 at half price. If true, 2019 will be an exciting year for the graphics card market.

| INTEL IN 2019

We know much less about what Intel is going to do in 2019. It is known that the silicon giant is going to do something, but at the moment the details are covered with a veil of secrecy.

We’re confident Intel will have a roller coaster ride between Cannon Lake, Sunny Cove and some HEDT chips this year – just like every year.

Sunny Cove? Kaby Cannon? Coffee Lake Refresh came out just a couple of months ago, bringing together an extremely high core count and clock speed for the first time – the Intel Core i9-9900K has sunk the competition. But even against this background, we note a time delay. We’ve been waiting for 10nm Cannon Lake processors for years, so we hope to see a more efficient processor in 2019 – even if it’s called Sunny Cove instead.

More laptop processors. Even though Intel’s 9th Gen CPU kicked off in October 2018 with Coffee Lake Refresh, we still see tons of laptops with 8th Gen Kaby Lake Refresh processors that were released back in early 2018. We expect Intel to update mainstream laptops next year, although we’d be delighted to see the first laptops with Whiskey Lake processors.

Intel graphics… Intel has been hinting at launching its own line of graphics cards for some time now, and we have to admit we’re intrigued. While Intel took the stage and said it was going to release graphics cards in 2020 instead of 2019, Intel is likely to showcase some of the new graphics architectures. Will it be consumer graphics cards? Or – which we think is more likely – GPUs aimed at battling Nvidia Volta and AMD Vega in the professional market? We just need to wait and see.

| NVIDIA IN 2019

Nvidia has had a pretty busy 2018, so we don’t expect anything ground-breaking from the graphics giant.

The company has already released Turing for consumers and Volta for professionals and big data, so we’ll likely see the series expand throughout 2019.

More on Turing tabletop graphics… We started getting the first leaks and rumors about the Nvidia RTX 2060 coming out. The Nvidia Turing line as it exists today is extremely expensive, so we look forward to the RTX 2060 fixing this by making it more affordable for consumers. Not everyone wants to shell out over 50,000 rubles for a video card.

RTX Mobility… Sure, the best gaming PCs have had access to Nvidia Turing for months now, but what about gaming laptops? It’s CES 2019, where Nvidia is announcing RTX Mobility graphics cards for laptops. We’ll probably see the RTX 2070 Max-Q as the first mobile GPU, but we could see the RTX 2080 in laptops as well.

Here are the best laptops of 2019.