AMD Announces Keynote Dates for Zen 3 and RX 6000 "Big Navi"

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Zen 3 and Big Navi to land soon

(Image credit: AMD)

After what seems like an eternity, AMD finally came out of the woodwork and officially announced launch dates for its highly anticipated CPUs and GPUs. The Zen 3 keynote will be on 10/8/2020 at 10am PT, and the RX 6000 "Big Navi" keynote is on 10/28/2020 at 10am PT.

What does this mean for AMD? On the CPU side of things, Zen 3 is rumored to be an absolute monster of an architecture. We've already pieced together plenty of info on the Zen 3 architecture, which you can read here. Based on what we already know, Zen 3 will be based on an enhanced 7nm node from TSMC (either N7P or N7+), and focus significantly on increasing IPC performance through improvements to the L1-L3 caches, and perhaps even increased cache capacity.

For AMD's RDNA 2/Big Navi architectures, we've been anticipating their launch for months, and with Nvidia's Ampere GPUs now heading into the market, we all are hoping for good competition from AMD in the graphics card market.

The little we know about the RX 6000 series is that it will run on the latest 7nm node from TSMC with a near 50% performance-per-watt improvement over the RX 5000 series (RDNA 1). We believe AMD will change course and start competing with Nvidia's higher-end offerings like the RTX 3080. Whereas right now, AMD's flagship, the RX 5700 XT, competes in the mid-range only. For reference, in our Best Graphics Cards of 2020 overview, we set the RX 5700 XT just below the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER.

Specs for the new PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X has also given us some useful information regarding RDNA 2's capabilities, both consoles could have up to RTX 2080 Ti performance for under 250W including the entire system. So we know RDNA 2 is a very capable architecture, but this is just for consoles – we will see different results on desktop variants in the future.

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Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

47 Comments Comment from the forums
  • DrummerManSpike
    Oh you know it's gonna be good.
    Reply
  • ravenboldie
    Nah, I refuse to believe that the consoles have anything near 2080 Ti performance. Doing the math states it's not possible.
    Reply
  • Schlachtwolf
    Oh boy I love my 2700x BUT this is what I have been waiting for.......:giggle:
    Reply
  • st379
    What an exciting year RTX 3000, RDNA 2, Zen 3...

    Oh and I forgot Intel 14nm+++++++ Whatever Lake.
    Reply
  • digitalgriffin
    October 28th announcement for big Navi. If they announce a release date past October 28th, they might as well throw away a couple million in sales. 2 months wait time is a hell of a wait after NVIDIA 30 series release info. People will get an itchy finger as backlog orders for new GPU's will be high. (I predict)

    I want to wait to see what Big Navi can do. If it gets close to EDIT]3080 I'm sold if the price is right. But let's say I wait, and it's a disappointment. Then I'll likely have to wait 2+ months to get my hands on a NVIDIA 30 series PAST October 28th because supply will be tight. That's a 4+ month wait time and that's actually asking a lot of gamers who are shopping.

    It leaves me perplexed as first silicon was available in March? What is AMD thinking with this long delay? AMD seems reactive more than proactive on these issues. The same thing happened with the RX480. The NVIDIA 10 series gained a lot of ground during that delay time.
    Reply
  • cryoburner
    digitalgriffin said:
    If they announce a release date past October 28th, they might as well throw away a couple million in sales.
    From the sound of it, RTX 30-series cards will likely be in extremely short supply for months following their launch. So, most of those hoping to get a 30-series card within the next few months without paying a massive markup to resellers probably won't be able to. So, AMD probably isn't too concerned about losing sales due to their cards coming a mere month or two later. This also gives them the ability to gauge reception and availability of the 3070 and 3080 prior to determining final prices. With the RX 5000 series, they had to make a number of last-minute changes to pricing and performance due to Nvidia countering them with their SUPER cards, and they probably don't want a repeat of that. And even if RDNA2 cards might have potentially been first going into production months ago, AMD may not have been able to manufacture them at full capacity right away due to limited 7nm production, and their need to dedicate much of that to millions of console chips and CPUs.
    Reply
  • YoAndy
    Well I hope they release good drivers.
    Reply
  • st379
    digitalgriffin said:
    October 28th announcement for big Navi. If they announce a release date past October 28th, they might as well throw away a couple million in sales. 2 months wait time is a hell of a wait after NVIDIA 30 series release info. People will get an itchy finger as backlog orders for new GPU's will be high. (I predict)

    I want to wait to see what Big Navi can do. If it gets close to 2080 I'm sold if the price is right. But let's say I wait, and it's a disappointment. Then I'll likely have to wait 2+ months to get my hands on a NVIDIA 30 series PAST October 28th because supply will be tight. That's a 4+ month wait time and that's actually asking a lot of gamers who are shopping.

    It leaves me perplexed as first silicon was available in March? What is AMD thinking with this long delay? AMD seems reactive more than proactive on these issues. The same thing happened with the RX480. The NVIDIA 10 series gained a lot of ground during that delay time.
    Did you mean 3080 or 2080? because 2080 is really disappointing.
    RDNA 1 is more or less perf per watt like rtx 2000. I actually think more in the level of rtx 3080 with their 50% claims from their last slideshow.
    Reply
  • digitalgriffin
    st379 said:
    Did you mean 3080 or 2080? because 2080 is really disappointing.
    RDNA 1 is more or less perf per watt like rtx 2000. I actually think more in the level of rtx 3080 with their 50% claims from their last slideshow.

    Good catch, I meant 3080. I'll go back and correct it.
    Reply
  • st379
    digitalgriffin said:
    My bad, I meant 3080. I'll go back and correct it.
    lol yes it was look kind of weird :).
    And 7nm euv from TSMC is better than Samsung 8nm so they have the advantage here even if the architecture is not on the same level.
    Reply