Watch out for all of AMD's upcoming events: Computex, E3, and Hot Chips

[onetheycallEric]

Highly anticipated: AMD has announced a few important dates that are worth keeping on your radar. AMD is set to kick off a busy summer with a big presence at Computex, followed by events at E3 and Hot Chips 31 (2019). Long awaited product lines, especially on the graphics side are incoming.

As we approach Q3, AMD has a busy schedule, beginning an aggressive product launch cadence centered on its 7nm portfolio.

There's the Zen 2-based Ryzen 3000, Radeon Navi GPUs, and the Epyc Rome datacenter CPUs. What's more, AMD will have a string of events intersecting these product announcements. Below we have a recap of all of the chipmaker's upcoming events, and where to watch and learn more.

• Computex 2019, Sunday, May 26:
  This is the first stop for AMD, where AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su will be giving a pre-show keynote. Once Computex kicks off in earnest, we expect a slew of news from AMD regarding Ryzen 3000, the X570 chipset and accompanying motherboards, Epyc Rome, and possibly Navi. AMD's Computex keynote will be live-streamed here.
• AMD Next Horizon Gaming event, Monday, June 10:
  At E3 2019, AMD will host its Next Horizon Gaming event, where Dr. Lisa Su is expected to give a presentation detailing next generation products related to gaming across PCs, consoles, and the cloud. AMD could also unwrap Navi details here, as AMD has chosen this venue for past graphics card launches like the R9 Fury X and the RX 400-series.
  There will be a live stream, which can be viewed via AMD's YouTube channel or Facebook page.
• Hot Chips, Monday, August 19:
  At Hot Chips, Dr. Lisa Su will deliver yet another keynote, titled "Delivering the Future of High-Performance Computing with System, Software and Silicon Co-Optimization." Hot Chips has become a place of preference for chip makers to dive into microarchitecture overviews, and AMD is expected to discuss the x86 Zen 2 and Navi architectures and their roadmap for the months and years to come.

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https://www.techspot.com/news/80186-watch-out-all-amd-upcoming-events-computex-e3.html

 

[RaXoR]

May 26th is all I care about. I am ready to upgrade from my R5 1600 to a R7 3700x!

 

[Lew Zealand]

I've put off building a new machine since December just to see what AMD has, and for my uses it's gonna come down to one thing: AVX. If Zen 2 can improve on Zen and Zen+'s abysmal performance in h.265 encoding at least to where Intel currently is, then I'm sold as the increased core counts should send the most affordable, power efficient transcoding well over to the AMD side.

Time, and Steve, will tell.

 

[Puiu]

May 26th is all I care about. I am ready to upgrade from my R5 1600 to a R7 3700x!

This will be just the announcement. It will be a while longer until you see them in stores.

I've put off building a new machine since December just to see what AMD has, and for my uses it's gonna come down to one thing: AVX. If Zen 2 can improve on Zen and Zen+'s abysmal performance in h.265 encoding at least to where Intel currently is, then I'm sold as the increased core counts should send the most affordable, power efficient transcoding well over to the AMD side.

Time, and Steve, will tell.

AVX is one of their big improvements, they'll have proper AVX256 support.
It seems though that AMD isn't keen on moving fast to AVX512 as Intel is (not that it is used much now anyway) and I don't blame them. AVX512 is currently composed on a huge number of instruction sets. I don't think even Intel supports everything across all of their new CPUs (Ice Lake should add another 6 new AVX512 instructions).

The biggest difference will be on how AMD handles the CPU downclocks during AVX workloads. Will they manage to keep clocks high or will they slow down more than Intel? AVX256 and especially AVX512 bring the clock speeds down considerably in some workloads for Intel.

 

[EEatGDL]

I'm happy with my Zen build and waiting to build my Zen 2 gaming rig this winter.

 

[Aus spot]

I am ready to upgrade from my R5 1600 to a R7 3700x!

Lots of old cheap perfectly good components coming up in the second hand market.

 

[Danny101]

Looking forward to seeing what they got. I really haven't paid much attention to the leaks. Not like I did the first generation. It's all hype until the real CPU's drop and then looking out for the reviews. I assume this will be the last AM4-based CPU. At least for the 370 chipset.

 

[Danny101]

I've put off building a new machine since December just to see what AMD has, and for my uses it's gonna come down to one thing: AVX. If Zen 2 can improve on Zen and Zen+'s abysmal performance in h.265 encoding at least to where Intel currently is, then I'm sold as the increased core counts should send the most affordable, power efficient transcoding well over to the AMD side.

Time, and Steve, will tell.

Have you look at AV1? It's looks to be the next royalty-free codec and will have wide support.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AV1
In a comparison of AV1 against H.264 (x264) and VP9 (libvpx), Facebook showed about 45–50% bitrate savings over H.264 and about 40% over VP9 when using a constant quality encoding mode.

 

[Evernessince]

May 26th is all I care about. I am ready to upgrade from my R5 1600 to a R7 3700x!

This will be just the announcement. It will be a while longer until you see them in stores.

I've put off building a new machine since December just to see what AMD has, and for my uses it's gonna come down to one thing: AVX. If Zen 2 can improve on Zen and Zen+'s abysmal performance in h.265 encoding at least to where Intel currently is, then I'm sold as the increased core counts should send the most affordable, power efficient transcoding well over to the AMD side.

Time, and Steve, will tell.

AVX is one of their big improvements, they'll have proper AVX256 support.
It seems though that AMD isn't keen on moving fast to AVX512 as Intel is (not that it is used much now anyway) and I don't blame them. AVX512 is currently composed on a huge number of instruction sets. I don't think even Intel supports everything across all of their new CPUs (Ice Lake should add another 6 new AVX512 instructions).

The biggest difference will be on how AMD handles the CPU downclocks during AVX workloads. Will they manage to keep clocks high or will they slow down more than Intel? AVX256 and especially AVX512 bring the clock speeds down considerably in some workloads for Intel.

Correct, Intel does not fully support all AVX512 features yet.

AMD is already on record that Zen 2 will not downclock at all when running AVX instructions. Zen 1 doesn't downclock when running AVX either. They doubled the size of the registers to support 256 bit AVX in a single pass.

I would not technically call Zen 1's design inferior to Intel's current implementation. Intel has higher burst performance but that is quickly throttled by power and thermal limiting. Zen 1's performance is much more stable and can maintain it's performance over a long period of time. This goes double if you are doing long encodes on a subpar cooler. I expect Zen 2's AVX implementation to be better in every dimension.

 

[Lew Zealand]

Purely going by TechSpot's and other's reviews of Zen and Zen+ processors, the performance metric where those two designs trailed Intel by the largest margin was h.265 encoding. The very thing that's most time/performance limiting in what I wanted a new CPU for.

It was quite a disappointment as all other metrics looked pretty good. h.264 speed is fine on the Zens, just not h.265. And the Zens which exceeded the Intel chips' overall performance thanks to higher core counts did end up using quite a bit more power per frame than my Intel benchmark, the Core i5-8400.

If Zen2 matches that h.265 power per frame efficiency while adding more cores, then my new machine will probably be that Zen2, while my 8400 gets repurposed down the ladder (and a Ryzen 3 trickles even further down...). If it doesn't match, then I'll get a lower end Zen2 for that down-the-ladder person.