AMD CES 2019 keynote was a big one. There were a couple of big announcements and keeping in mind that this marks AMD’s 50 years in the business it is safe to say that the company held nothing back. It is also interesting to note that this was the companies first keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show.
Here we are going to look into the AMD CES 2019 keynote and what AMD had to announce.
AMD Radeon VII Beats Nvidia To 7nm
AMD is the only company in the world that not only makes CPUs but GPUs and there are 400 million players that game using AMD Radeon graphics. At CES 2019 AMD CEO Lisa Su announced the MAD Radeon VII, the first 7nm based GPU for gaming. It has 60 compute units, offers 25% more performance at the same power, 16 GB of HBM2 memory and 1 TB per second bandwidth.
The AMD Radeon VII comes with all the advance Vega features and we got to see a demo where DMC 5 was played at 4K and the card could easily run the game at 90+ FPS. That is impressive indeed. AMD also revealed some benchmarks for other games at 4K max settings and you can check them out below:
We also got to see the AMD Radeon VII running The Division 2 and while we did not see any FPS numbers but it seems that the game will be optimized for AMD hardware as Ubisoft mentioned that the game will support all the features of AMD Vega and looking at the gameplay the game seems to be running fine at 4K.
AMD announced that The Division 2 will be bundled with AMD Radeon VII and some select AMD Ryzen CPUs so that it even better value for money. The graphics card will be available starting February 7th and will cost $699. For a limited time, you will be able to get Resident Evil 2, The Division 2 and Devil May Cry 5 with the purchase of the AMD Radeon VII.
AMD Radeon VII is actually required to run The Division 2 at 4K 60 FPS and you can check out the requirements of the game below:
Elite – 4K/60 FPS
- OS: Windows 7, 8, 10
- Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X, Intel Core I9-7900X
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: AMD Radeon VII, Nvidia Geforce RTX 2080 TI
- VRAM: 11 GB
- DIRECT X: DirectX 11, 12
AMD Ryzen 3rd Generation Zen 2 7nm
Next generation AMD Ryzen CPUs were teased at CES 2019 and AMD revealed that these CPUs will be based on AMD Zen 2 architecture and the 7nm process. So AMD is not only releasing 7nm gaming graphics this year but consumer CPUs as well.
AMD showed a short demo of Forza Horizon 4 using an early AMD Ryzen 3rd generation sample and the AMD Radeon VII graphics card and the game was running above 60 FPS at 1080p at max settings.
AMD also ran a Cinebench benchmark with the 8 core 16 thread 3rd generation AMD Ryzen chip alongside the top of the line Intel 9900K which comes with similar configuration. The AMD chip was an early sample which means that the frequencies were not final but the performance was pretty impressive.
The 8 core 16 thread 3rd generation AMD Ryzen chip scored 2057 points while the Intel 9900K scored 2040. While this might not be a huge margin the power consumption of the AMD Ryzen chip was lower. While the Intel 9900K was drawing 180W, the AMD Ryzen chip was only drawing 135W which is very impressive keeping in mind this is not the final version.
AMD CEO Lisa Su showed the 7nm chip and what it looks like under the hood and also announced that these upcoming chips will support PCIe 4.0 which will be the next standard for graphics cards. She also mentioned that the upcoming CPUs will be supported on the AMD AM4 socket so you can use your existing motherboards. While we do not have specifics we know that these CPUs will be released in the middle of 2019.
Thin and Light Laptops With a Lot of Power
160 million notebooks are going to be sold in 2019 and the thin and light category is the fastest growing one. AMD’s vision is to reduce the size of laptops but to provide desktop level performance at the same time. Sounds too good to be true right? The cherry on top is that AMD also wants to provide battery life that will last all day. That is an impressive vision indeed.
AMD has already shown off the AMD Ryzen Mobile chips last year and at that time they were one of the fastest mobile chips on the market. Now the 2nd generation of AMD Ryzen Mobile chips are out and use the 7nm process. These provide longer battery life and better performance than the previous version.
| Product Model | Cores / Threads | TDP | Boost / Base Freq. | Radeon Graphics | GPU Cores | Max GPU Freq. | L2+L3 Cache |
| AMD Ryzen 7 3750H | 4C/8T | 35W | 4.0/2.3 GHz | Vega | 10 | 1400 MHz | 6MB |
| AMD Ryzen 7 3700U | 4C/8T | 15W | 4.0/2.3 GHz | Vega | 10 | 1400 MHz | 6MB |
| AMD Ryzen 5 3550H | 4C/8T | 35W | 3.7/2.1 GHz | Vega | 8 | 1200 MHz | 6MB |
| AMD Ryzen 5 3500U | 4C/8T | 15W | 3.7/2.1 GHz | Vega | 8 | 1200 MHz | 6MB |
| AMD Ryzen 3 3300U | 4C/4T | 15W | 3.5/2.1 GHz | Vega | 6 | 1200 MHz | 6MB |
| AMD Ryzen 3 3200U | 2C/4T | 15W | 3.5/2.6 GHz | Vega | 3 | 1200 MHz | 5MB |
| AMD Athlon 300U | 2C/4T | 15W | 3.3/2.4 GHz | Vega | 3 | 1000 MHz | 5MB |
AMD CEO Lisa Su announced at CES 2019 that the AMD Ryzen Mobile processors are the fastest chips for ultra-thin form factor notebooks. These chips are able to load web pages up to 14% faster and can speed up editing media by up to 27%. These chips support 4K HDR. The 2nd generation processors offer up to 10 hours of general productivity and up to 12 hours of video playback.
These new chips come with up to 10 AMD Vega graphics cores and enables gaming in a thin and light form factor. AMD has a record number of laptops hitting the market this year and the company has announced that it will be providing proper driver support for AMD Ryzen Mobile starting next month.
Let us know what you think about the AMD CES 2019 keynote and which products you are most excited about.
