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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Korguz - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
amd where is intel 10 nm hstewart? practically no where to be found, IN VOLUME !! does 10 nm even have more then 4 cores yet?? come on man, post something to prove your bias towards intel, you jsut as bad as gondalfHStewart - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
Mobile market is larges part of market now days - just visit you local bestbuy. Desktop's are far becoming dinosaurs in the computer industry. my last one is actually not even normal pc - but a over 10 year old dual xeon 3ghz core 2 supermicro. Unfortunately the audio chip is not supported by Windows 10 and it sits - Until the i7's came out it was faster than anything out there.Spunjji - Friday, March 13, 2020 - link
I'm always fascinated by how abnormal your computer buying habits are, and how you still think you have insight into what the majority of consumers and/or enthusiasts want.HStewart - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
Just go into local Bestbuy, and you should find laptops with i7-1065G7 like Surface Laptop 3 from Microsoft and other HP x360 and others.Xyler94 - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
Where do I even begin with your statements.First off, AMD knows that Ice Lake for Mobile is not Ice Lake for Servers, just like Intel knows that AMD's Ryzen 4000 APUs are not Epyc Milan.
Secondly, the average user could do everything on an ARM powered device. No one needs an Intel Ice Lake CPU, they need a Processor capable of running Chrome/Firefox, and the odd Facebook game, something any decent ARM CPU can do. And ARM completely wipes the floor with Intel when it comes to efficiency. So you're asking if they'd prefer longer battery life, yes they would, but that means even Intel is gonna lose. And don't go off on the whole "But X86" tangent. The average consumer doesn't even know what the hell that is. All they care about is perceived performance for their web browsing needs.
Now if we then bump to the professional users, those who need to do actual work on their PCs, they need performance before 30 minutes extra of battery life. So Intel or AMD, to them, it doesn't matter, what matters is what laptop will be best for their needs, and/or whatever their company buys them. So at this level, nobody cares about Intel vs AMD, it's all about "Can I get my work done in a timely manner". And news flash, people aren't going with Intel because it's better, people are going with Intel because of the marketing. They know the name Intel, because they saw it in an ad, and they go with it. That's how simple minded the average consumer is.
The naming numbers of the nodes are whacked, yeah. But just because the naming is whacked, doesn't mean that 7nm TSMC is worse than Intel 10nm. We haven't seen Intel 10nm in anything but small, low power parts. Remember that Ice Lake EP is going to need to be vastly bigger than the parts in the laptops, a significant number bigger. Means yields have to finally be good enough, or Intel will suffer.
That's on top of remembering that AMD is not standing still. They're busy with Milan Zen3 cores too. so Ice Lake EP has to go against something that'll be better than Zen2 Rome Cores, which is not an easy task. Can Intel do it? Absolutely. Will it be the be-all end-all you're hoping for? Not a chance.
Xyler94 - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
Just wanted to add. My new work laptop is an HP Enterprise laptop, with an AMD Ryzen CPU. I'm guessing the reason my company went with this is because it was cheaper, not because of Intel vs AMD. So far, I've had 0 issues with it. I had an Intel laptop before, and that too ran just fine. The literal reason I have an AMD laptop for work, is because it was cheaper.Xyler94 - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
I just wanna add one last thing.Intel doesn't give a rat's bottom what you, me or Korguz buy. They don't care if you happen to buy a Dell Laptop, or an HP one, or so-on. They care what Dell Buys, they care what Amazon buys, they care what Microsoft buys, you know... those ordering several thousand units at a time. Intel woke the heck up when people started buying AMD Epyc CPUs, so much in fact that for every % of the server market that AMD captures, they try desperately to claw back.
They don't care about a notebook CPU sale, that's even less money than they make on the Desktop CPUs, they care about the huge server sales, and that hurts them the most.
Korguz - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
" Desktop's are far becoming dinosaurs in the computer industry " maybe in some markets, but no one i know is looking for a notebook, they STILL want a desktop. so please hstewart, you keep saying desktops are dead, but do you have a source for this, or is it just more of your intel bias ? besides, 10 series is low volume, 4 core parts that seem to perform on par or worse then the 14nm products, and could very well perform worse then ryzen 4000, just have to wait to see on that one.haukionkannel - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
Pretty much. Only gamers buy desktops. Our company is completely gonna move away desktop. In future we only buy laptops and all of my friends who don`t play Computer games buy laptops...Yep desktop is dead dinosaur. Fortunately I myself did one fossil and am now owner of big full tower pc, with 64Gb ram, several teras storage etc... but I know that I belong to tiny, tiny minority.
Even I have more laptop computers than desktop.
Korguz - Friday, March 6, 2020 - link
" Only gamers buy desktops " nope.. a few people i know are replacing their notebooks with desktops cause they need a little more power, to get that power in a notebook, costs a little more then they are willing to spend, the only notebooks where i work, are used by the salesmen that spend most of their time in the field, the rest, are desktops. i guess each area and region are different.