The AMD keynote at CES 2019 took place on January 9 this year. It could have been described as dominated by the announcement for the company's next line of GPUs, the Radeon VIIs. The presentation then moved on to outline the potential of the next generation of EPYC server-grade CPUS. The keynote also had something to say about the second-gen Ryzens, however.
This new line of desktop CPUs, which, as with the upcoming EPYC processors, will be based on a 7-nanometer architecture, was demonstrated to a certain extent. One excipient of it, described as an engineering sample, was shown to beat the Core i9-9900K in Cinebench, a test in which it used less power compared to its Intel counterpart (133.4 watts (W) compared to 179.9W).
This third-gen Ryzen variant was described as an 8-core, 16-thread processor, which is in line with some earlier speculation. Su also confirmed that this new line of processors will be the first to support the new PCIe 4.0 standard. Interestingly, a real-life Ryzen 3000 chipset was also displayed on stage; it has two dies, the smaller of which is the actual 7nm processor. The remaining, larger die is dedicated to I/O and GPU interactions.
Dr. Su, the AMD CEO did not mention pricing for this new CPU type at the keynote. However, the executive did state that it, as with the second-generation EPYC series, would be available by the second half of 2019. Therefore, we still have a lot of intriguing detail on next-generation Zen computing to come.