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AMD announces launch dates for Zen 3 CPUs and RDNA 2 "Big Navi" graphics cards

AMD's RDNA 2 and Zen 3 will launch October 28 and October 8, respectively. (Images via AMD and AMD on Twitter)
AMD's RDNA 2 and Zen 3 will launch October 28 and October 8, respectively. (Images via AMD and AMD on Twitter)
AMD today tweeted out the official launch dates of their upcoming CPU and GPU platforms. Zen 3 and RDNA 2 will be the bases for AMD's next generation of CPUs and graphics cards, respectively. While the announcements didn't include many details, we now know that Zen 3 will officially launch on October 8 and RDNA 2 (with Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs) will launch on October 28.

AMD’s Zen 3 and RDNA 2 are perhaps the most anticipated computing platforms for 2020. Now we have a firm date on when we will see them.

AMD posted a teaser video for its next generation of GPUs. The Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs, which are built on the RDNA 2 architecture, will officially launch on October 28. Nicknamed “Big Navi,” these graphics cards will be AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s recently released GeForce RTX 3000 series cards.

AMD has a big task in front of it; Nvidia’s new Ampere cards seem to be a sizable upgrade over the RTX 2000 series. The RTX 2000 cards, built on Nvidia’s Turing architecture, beat AMD’s RDNA 1 (Navi) cards by a fair margin. AMD has a big gap to make up in order to outperform Nvidia. The veil will officially be lifted on RDNA 2 on October 28.

A curious note in the teaser video for the RDNA 2 launch is the mention of support for “PCs and consoles.” This should remove most of the doubt as to whether or not the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 will use RDNA 2 GPUs. It seems that this will indeed be the case. 

AMD will also officially launch its next CPU architecture, Zen 3, on October 8. Stating that “it’s going to be an exciting fall for gamers,” AMD CEO Lisa Su posted a teaser video of Zen 3 on Twitter. There’s not a lot we know about Zen 3, but current speculation is that it will be built on the same (or similar) 7 nm process as Zen 2 but may reconfigure how the chip is arranged, most notably the L3 cache.

We reported yesterday that the upcoming Ryzen 4000 chips (codenamed Vermeer) will feature up to 10 multithreaded cores and may include improved overclocking features, something that will entice gamers. We’ll know more about Zen 3 when it officially launches next month.

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> Expert Reviews and News on Laptops, Smartphones and Tech Innovations > News > News Archive > Newsarchive 2020 09 > AMD announces launch dates for Zen 3 CPUs and RDNA 2 "Big Navi" graphics cards
Sam Medley, 2020-09- 9 (Update: 2020-09- 9)