“Navi Refresh and RDNA 2 will be released in 2020”

With the Radeon RX 5000 series, AMD introduced for the first time in over seven years a new architecture on the graphics side – Radeon DNA (RDNA). Today, the series covers the upper and lower middle class, from the Radeon RX 5700 XT down to the RX 5500 XT with the newly launched RX 5600 XT in between.

In 2019, we launched our new architecture in GPUs, it’s the RDNA architecture, and that was the Navi based products. You should expect that those will be refreshed in 2020 – and we’ll have a next generation RDNA architecture that will be part of our 2020 lineup. So we’re pretty excited about that, and we’ll talk more about that at our financial analyst day. On the data center GPU side, you should also expect that we’ll have some new products in the second half of this year.

In connection with AMD’s latest quarterly report, the company’s CEO Lisa Su was asked about the plans for graphics cards in the year 2020. Here Lisa Su gossips that the current generation that goes by the collective name “Navi” will be refreshed, refresh, however, without going into further details.

The statement is in line with information SweClockers recently received, that AMD has succeeded in getting higher performance and energy efficiency out of its existing graphics circuits through a spin, which is often called a re-spin. It is a term used in the manufacture of circuits, where minor changes in a design have taken place.

It is common that a circuit does not work optimally on the first try and that they therefore need to be corrected at the transistor level, in order to then test manufacture again. To make one re-spin takes in round slings two to three months and is thus time consuming. A circuit is seldom considered to be completely “perfect” and sometimes companies have to settle for being able to get a product on the market.

Prior to the launch of the graphics family Navi and the Radeon RX 5000 series, there were rumors that AMD did not reach its own goals in terms of energy efficiency, which was worse than expected. If this is true, it is thus possible that AMD has had time to rectify the problem since its launch in the summer of 2019.

In the same breath, Lisa Su says that in 2020 AMD will launch the next generation of RDNA architecture, ie RDNA 2. In addition to architectural improvements and new functions, this will be manufactured on TSMC’s refined 7-nanometer technology (7nm +) with EUV lithography.

It is worth mentioning in this context that AMD earlier in the year confirmed that Navi with higher performance, often called Big Navi, is coming into effect in 2020. It has also been said that this will be based on the RDNA 2 architecture.

Update, at 5:05 p.m. To Tom’s Hardware, AMD clarifies that the statement from Lisa Su is very much about the next generation of RDNA, but does not provide clarity in exactly what is meant by “refresh”.

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