Multiple AMD Navi Launches planned for 2019, Lisa Su confirms

At their Q4 earnings call, AMD CEO Lisa Su revealed what Radeon fans have been waiting to hear for quite some time. She confirmed that the next-generation 7nm Navi GPU will arrive in 2019, however, what’s intriguing is that Su didn’t say a singular launch, but instead used the plural, “Navi launches.”

Navi GPU confirmed but unlikely to offer High-end solution yet

Last month, on 29th January, AMD reported its fourth quarter of 2018 results. During the earnings call, the company’s boss Lisa Su also shed light on their current state of GPU business. She said the business would experience a “low point” in Q1 2019, but the things would improve as they go into the second quarter.

With new products on the way, Su claimed that there would be a lot of gaming growth going on in 2019, specifically saying:

Our gaming growth will be driven by new products. We would see that as we go through this year and with our Radeon 7 launch, as well as our Navi launches on the gaming side.

Transcript via Seeking Alpha

If I had to guess I would say those multiple launches will probably be the announcement of the next-generation of Xbox and PlayStation consoles featuring AMD’s Zen 2 CPU and Navi GPU. On the desktop side, Navi will replace Polaris in the RX 580 range of things.

In this context, we have already published a report suggesting that AMD’s 7nm Radeon VII will take care of the high-end segment while Navi will be more of a mid-range GPU.

Thirdly, in the mobile sector, it would potentially replace Vega compute units – including those found on the Intel Kaby Lake G chips – offering a low-end, low-power Navi solution.

Alternatively, Su could be referring to multiple desktop launches of which we first get the mid-tier, and then the high-end range by the end of the year.

I am not necessarily betting on that because there’s been rumors that AMD had to retake Navi which means the process that they had set up with TSMC didn’t come back the way they were expecting it to. That is why we didn’t see it announced at CES, instead looking at a launch sometime around Computex in June.

Further, as I mentioned earlier, it seems likely that the launch won’t include the “big Navi,” which is something that is expected to compete with Nvidia’s RTX series of cards. Rather, we’re going to just see the mid-tier Navi cards this year.

Either way, it’s good to see Navi finally confirmed for 2019, and what’s more exciting is that it’s coming in multiple different varieties. I guess we will have to wait and see what that is going to be.