AMD’s on-schedule projects underscore Intel’s continuing failures to deliver.
During AMD’s second-quarter earnings call, CEO Lisa Su said that all of the company’s upcoming 2020 product launches are still on schedule—meaning Zen 3 desktop CPUs, RDNA 2 “Big Navi” GPUs, and console hardware for the PS5 and Xbox Series X.
This is great news for consumers but bad news for Intel, which reorganized its engineering department this week shortly after admitting that we won’t be seeing its 7nm desktop CPUs until late 2022 or perhaps even 2023.
This isn’t quite as bad as it sounds—there’s a discrepancy between the way the two companies measure process size, and transistor density for Intel’s 7nm process should be roughly equivalent to AMD fab partner TSMC’s 5nm process. Unfortunately, the delay means TSMC should be debuting its 3nm parts around the same time that Intel now expects to be launch its own 7nm.
AMD’s own good news continued with the earnings themselves, with revenue up 26 percent and net income up $122 million—a whopping 449 percent—year on year. Su attributed the increase primarily to Epyc and Ryzen CPUs, with special focus on Ryzen 4000 mobile—the company’s average sale price actually dropped year-on-year due to the increased revenue from the individually less-expensive mobile processors. Su went on to say that the revenue from mobile Ryzen 4000 ramped up “faster than any mobile processor in our history.”
We don’t yet have firm dates for Zen 3 CPUs, but they’re generally expected to launch in Q3 2020. We also don’t know for certain which CPU lines will initially launch on Zen 3—but Epyc seems likely to lead the way, since its next-gen Milan is the only specific Zen 3 product AMD has committed to a 2020 launch so far. Meanwhile, Big Navi GPUs are expected to launch around the same time, and PS5 and Xbox Series X are expected “in time for the holidays.”
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JIM SALTER
