Speculation: Spring refresh for Ryzen

[Vattila]

As I've posted elsewhere, I think AMD fell short of their frequency targets for the Ryzen 3000 series. A later launch than expected, statements relating to frequency challenges, Max Boost redefinition, boost issues, 3900X shortages, and now the 3950X delay from September to November, do all corroborate this. I guess they aimed for 5 GHz, but fell ~8% short.

However, TSMC is firing on all cylinders. Amongst a number of process roadmap announcements, they now offer N7P as a refinement of their N7 process on which the Zen 2 chiplet is built. N7P is compatible with N7 design rules, so it should provide a fairly simple and cost-effective opportunity to optimise existing designs.

With that in mind, is there a chance that AMD will do a spring refresh based on a faster stepping of the CPU chiplet?

 

[beginner99]

Remember that Rocket Lake only goes up to 8 cores max.

True but then the target audience (high fps gamers) don't profit from more cores anyway, for gaming at least.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I wish next generation CPU's and GPU's will launch at old prices with 20% to 50% better performance than last gen. but looking at market trends I don't count on it.

Sometimes prices go down, though. Sometimes by a lot vs. inflation. Example:

AMD Athlon 64 FX-62 review: AMD Athlon 64 FX-62

AMD's Athlon 64 FX-62 helps usher in the new Socket AM2 chipset, but incremental performance gains make AMD look vulnerable to Intel's next-gen chips, due later this year.

www.cnet.com

The ill-fated FX-62 had an MSRP of over $700. That was top-tier performance in the AMD product stack at the time - essentially the equivalent of a 3900XT or 3950X depending on how you look at it. That's ~$906 in 2020 dollars. AMD doesn't even charge $700 for the 3900XT . . . yet! I certainly don't want them to go back there.

 

[yuri69]

AMD is most probably short of supply from TSMC. It would be logical to prioritize CCDs going into EPYCs instead of Ryzens. This will most probably be still the case with Zen 3. You can steer demand by pricing...

Another point would be beating Intel in gaming. This would allow AMD charging premium because they would simply be the best for "eli1t3 gamerzzZz".

 

[beginner99]

The ill-fated FX-62 had an MSRP of over $700. That was top-tier performance in the AMD product stack at the time - essentially the equivalent of a 3900XT or 3950X depending on how you look at it. That's ~$906 in 2020 dollars. AMD doesn't even charge $700 for the 3900XT . . . yet! I certainly don't want them to go back there.

I disagree. The FX-62 was a dual-core just like the best opterons available at that time. The 3950x is a 16-core vs a much, much more expensive 64-core threadripper which cost a lot more than $906. prices for top-end hardware have increased a lot but adimttely that hardware doesn't really help the average consumer much. A dual-core vs single core would have been a huge increase for everyone back then. So from client side we sure are in the age of "good enough".

 

[DrMrLordX]

I disagree. The FX-62 was a dual-core just like the best opterons available at that time.

AMD had dual cores all the way up and down their product stack, on AM2 and s939. They also had single-core CPUs bringing up the rear, but still. That's not really relevant. That particular epoch of the x86 market featured really low core density for server solutions.

 

[mopardude87]

Very boring refresh, i could only hope end of year is like last year was for AMD.