Updated AMD Ryzen and EPYC CPU Roadmaps March 2020: Milan, Genoa, and Vermeer
by Dr. Ian Cutress on March 5, 2020 6:40 PM EST
Everyone is interested in roadmaps – they give us a sense of an idea of what is coming in the future, and for the investors, it gives a level of expectation as to where the company might be in a year to five years. Today at AMD’s Financial Analyst Day, the company gave the latest updates on the CPU side of the business, for consumer and for enterprise.
AMD stated that its CPU roadmaps for its enterprise portfolio are going to offer more vision into the future than its consumer side for a couple of reasons. First, the enterprise market is built on a longer product cycle and it helps when planning these systems to know what is in the pipe publicly, but also from an investor standpoint where the enterprise market ultimately offers the bigger financial opportunity.
To that end, AMD confirmed what we essentially knew, with Zen 3 based Milan coming in ‘late 2020’.
Zen 4 based Genoa has already been announced as the CPU to power the El Capitan supercomputer, and in this roadmap AMD has put it as coming out by 2022. We asked AMD for clarification, and they stated that in this sort of graph, we should interpret it as the full stack of Genoa should be formally launched by the end of 2022. Given AMD’s recent 12-15 month cadence with the generations of EPYC, and the expected launch of Milan late this year, we would expect to see Genoa in early 2022.
Astute users might notice that Milan / Zen 3 has been listed as ‘7nm’, where previously it was listed as ‘7nm+’. We’ve got a whole news post on why AMD has made this change, but the short of it is that AMD initially put ‘7nm+’ to mean ‘an advanced version of 7nm’. When TSMC named its EUV version of 7nm as N7+, people had assumed they were the same, and AMD wanted to clarify that Milan is on a version of 7nm, and the exact version will be disclosed at a later date. In the future the company will avoid using ‘+’ so this doesn’t happen again (!). We also have Genoa listed as a 5nm product.
Harder numbers about Milan and Genoa are expected to be unveiled closer to their respective launch times.
On the consumer side, AMD said a little less, with its roadmap only going out to Zen 3, which has the codename ‘Vermeer’ for the desktop product.
In this graph, we see that the Zen 3 product here is on the far right, but so is the date – 2021. Does this mean Zen 3 for consumers is coming 2021? We asked AMD to clarify, and were told that we should interpret this as that the range of Zen 3 consumer products, such as desktop CPUs, HEDT CPUs, mobile APUs, and consumer APUs, should all be available by the end of 2021. The company clarified that Zen 3 will hit the consumer market ‘later this year’, meaning late 2020.
So here comes a poignant question – what is going to come first in 2020? Zen 3 for enterprise is listed as ‘late 2020’, and Zen 3 for consumer is ‘later this year’. AMD makes a lot more money on its enterprise products than its consumer products, and while it enjoys a healthy performance lead in both, it really wants to push its market share in enterprise a lot more to drive home the bigger financial potential. With this in mind, I highly suspect that given AMD’s lead in the consumer market, we might see the company push more of its Zen 3 silicon into the enterprise market as a priority, with only a limited 2020 consumer release. I could be wrong, but we will find out closer to the time.
Interested in more of our AMD Financial Analyst Day 2020 Coverage? Click here.
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Korguz - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
Hstewart, just checked my local best buy, and the computer store i would rather go to, and well. local comp store has 5 10xxx series based notebooks listed, 3 are out of stock, 1 model has a total of 6, and the 5th has 11 total in stock. all based on comet lake. NONE based on the 1065g67 cpu. 2 lenovo, and 3 MSI. local best buy only has 2 models based on the 10th gen cpu, and both are based on the 10710 cpu, and, of course, they are dells. and guess what, NONE are based on 10 nm, so i ask again, where is intels 10 nm ????? maybe where you are, they are available, but not here. and looks like 10nm, is also still stuck on 4 cores.Qasar - Tuesday, March 17, 2020 - link
a knew when i saw this post, that Hstewart wouldn't reply. keeps saying how intels 10nm is available and shipping, but, in fact, it is not shipping as well as he believes it to be.Spunjji - Friday, March 13, 2020 - link
"On the consumer side, i fully expect a very limited impact of Zen 3 up to the end of 2021"Based on what, your wet dreams? :D It's one thing to say it won't be out in significant numbers in 2020, but another thing entirely to add another year on for shits and giggles.
ET - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
The 7nm+ comment is interesting. It's hard for me to imagine AMD not using TSMC for Zen 3, and it has no other 'advanced 7nm' process.As for Zen 3 consumer release, my previous speculation was that AMD will release 8-16 cores only, with Zen 2 APUs at 6-8 cores, in 2020. AMD will release Threadripper Zen 3 in 2021, and next gen APU, so that's a clear 2021 release.
The most interesting part here is 'consumer APUs'. I had previously assumed that AMD will, going forward, be releasing new CPUs with prev gen APUs, but if we assume that Zen 4 is a 2022 product, then releasing Zen 3 desktop APUs in late 2021 means that it might not be part of of the next gen lineup. Which may be reasonable, if Zen 3 APUs are DDR4 and Zen 4 is DDR5.
rpg1966 - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
Did you mean pertinent, instead of poignant?Morfidus - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
can see Amd releasing a line up of zen 3 ryzen 5, 7 and 9 products but with limited supply at a premium price at the same time as the epyc line it would make business sense to do that and game a higher margin and then push it hard in 2021 when production is goodpsychobriggsy - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
I guess something like:Q3/4 2020 - Consumer Zen 3 4000 series (15-18m after Zen 2)
Q4 2020 - Epyc and TR Zen 3 (but mostly available from Q1 2021)
Q2 2021 - Zen 3 APU Mobile (15m after Renoir)
Q3 2021 - Zen 3 APU Desktop
zodiacfml - Saturday, March 7, 2020 - link
Depends on the initial volume they can get with Zen 3. If they can satisfy most of the volume in the high end consumer chips, they'd do it as the movement/change in enterprise is much slower.MirdhaHuda - Monday, March 9, 2020 - link
If any EPYC CPU Motherboard comes with muliple PCIe 4.0 support, so that we can build servers only PCIe 4.0 using multiple drive say, Gigabyte AORUS Nvme Add-in-Card 8TB High Performance Gaming, Advanced Thermal Solution with Copper Heatsink, Toshiba 3D TLC, 5 Year Warranty SSD GP-ASACNE6800TTTDAhttps://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-Performance-Advanc...
We can built ultra fast Database server.
scineram - Thursday, March 12, 2020 - link
What there any mention when the Renoir APUs might come?