AMD investor relations slides offer a glimpse of chips to come

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Can you really call something a leak if the company released it on purpose? AMD’s just released a slide deck for its investors, and buried in those slides are a few tiny nuggets of interesting information. Let’s take a quick peek into the red team’s path ahead.

First up is this slide, which notes that “Pro” versions of the second-generation Ryzen mobile chips are on the way here shortly. This slide also puts down the fascinating third-generation Ryzen desktop chips for “mid-year.” In the strictest sense, that isn’t news, but it’s still really nice to see AMD—a company with a history of difficulty in keeping deadlines—on track with its new hardware, especially given the unusual nature of the design.

That same slide also indicates that the Threadripper chips are coming this year, although the company didn’t narrow it down any further. We’d expect them to follow along shortly after the desktop chips. Once again, it’s not really a surprise that Threadripper the Third will emerge in 2019, given the close relation of Threadripper and EPYC CPUs. We already knew the Zen 2-based EPYC chips would be coming around before long, after all.

There’s also this slide above. It’s not nearly as interesting as the first slide, but it does seem to confirm another piece of news we already knew: Navi is on the way this year. We really don’t know much about AMD’s next graphics processors, but scuttlebutt says that AMD could launch as many as three separate cards, possibly as soon as E3 2019 this summer.

This slide also notes that AMD intends to launch a “next-gen” graphics part next year. Prior rumors had stated that AMD planned to launch low-end Navi cards this year, with a more powerful variation on the same theme coming in 2020. Given this slide, we’re now more inclined to believe that AMD is going to launch Navi as a mid-range part this year, and then follow up with high-end cards based on “Arcturus” next year. That’s not too far from what the company attempted with Polaris and Vega, really. Let’s hope Navi and Arcturus can revive competition in the graphics market.