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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Gondalf - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
You forgot Ice Lake Ep 10nm+ in the Q4 this year. So on server side the two companies will are neck to neck at the year end. Ice Lake EP looks like a very strong performer from recent leaks.On the consumer side, i fully expect a very limited impact of Zen 3 up to the end of 2021, the end of the 2020 launch will be on paper, without impact on revenue. So basically the landscape will not change, this giving Intel all the time to catch up in consumer.
Smell This - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
** AMD confirmed what we knew - Zen 3 based Milan coming in ‘late 2020’.**___________________________________________
► AMD has delivered, on-time, over the last 5 years
► Chipziller . . . . uhhhh, nope
Gandaft, however, consistently delivers his trolling yucks ...
(and, how is that Cascade Lake working out for you?)
Korguz - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
thats what gondalf does best, posts bias intel crap, and NO proofXyler94 - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
People aren't forgetting about Ice Lake, people are just not expecting Ice Lake to be this killer CPU.Like other's have mentioned, AMD built Zen2 to favourably compete against Ice Lake, but now Ice Lake has to go against Zen3, which is going to be better than Zen2.
Time will tell, but just like Zen parts, people won't be buying Ice Lake Xeons en-mass due to the qualification needed for new hardware, and there will be new hardware
HStewart - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
Current Ice Lake is not the same as Ice Lake EP that was mention. It is unknown what that would be like but I pretty sure Intel is hard at work at overcoming the issue with 10nm.But the really question for average customers ( gamer's are not average customer ), would you rather lave lower power / longer battery life / portable usage instead higher performance graphics and such that may never be used - how much GPU do you need for spread sheets. Keep in mind that Ice Lake GPU is more powerful than the older 14nm Integrated GPUs
schujj07 - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
Ice Lake EP is nothing more than the server version of Ice Lake. Just like Sandy Bridge EP is the server version of Sandy Bridge. The micro-architecture is the same, just made for higher core and socket counts.HStewart - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
Core count is the big thing that AMD pushes - so it should be significant - keeping in account that max Ice Lake core's is 4 and lower frequency but because of Architecture changes, higher performance than equivalent Intel Mobile CPU'she micro-architecture is same as Ice Lake chips - but much improved on 14nm chips including the recent 10th generation chips.
Korguz - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
and people keep pushing that clock speed is king, and because amd cant reach high clocks, thats why amd doesnt have the performance lead, but, they dont need the high clocks, intel does. think about it hstewart, even with lower clocks, zen 2 is competing very nicely with intel, what would it be like if zen 2 did get to the same clocks that intel does ?????Spunjji - Friday, March 13, 2020 - link
The *average* customer just wants something cheap and easily obtainable.HStewart - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
This is typically on forums, about ignoring this function and instead calling it 14+++++. But keep in mind Intel 10nm is pretty much the same as AMD 7nm and Intel 7nm is same as AMD 5nm.