AMD’s Lisa Su Confirms that Navi will have “Launches” in 2019

For those who don’t follow the PC gaming market closely, AMD’s Navi graphics architecture is the company’s successor to Vega, the core chip design which is used in many of AMD’s latest GPU offerings. Navi is the first GPU architecture that was designed with 7nm in mind from the outset, and is expected to deliver a notable performance and efficiency leap over the company’s existing Vega-based and Polaris-based offerings. 

Sadly, AMD has been tightlipped about their Navi architecture, but early roadmaps used the words “scalability” and “Nextgen Memory” to describe what the new architecture would offer. Our best guess is that Navi will be designed to scale better to the high-end of the GPU market, possibly breaking past the 64 CU limit of AMD’s Radeon Vega and older GCN designs, and utilise GDDR6 memory to cover the “Nextgen memory” section of the roadmap.    

In AMD’s earnings call, Lisa Su stated that AMD’s GPU business would experience a “low point” in Q1 2019, but that things would improve in Q2 as the retail channel becomes less congested. Lisa Su also suggested that AMD would have “additional product launches”, a comment which came immediately after Su’s claims that AMD would see improved Q2 GPU sales. These claims are not necessarily linked.