Everyone is concerned about roadmaps – they provide us a way of an thought of what’s coming sooner or later, and for the traders, it offers a stage of expectation as to the place the corporate is likely to be in a yr to 5 years. Today at AMD’s Financial Analyst Day, the corporate gave the newest updates on the CPU facet of the enterprise, for client and for enterprise.
AMD acknowledged that its CPU roadmaps for its enterprise portfolio are going to supply extra imaginative and prescient into the long run than its client facet for a few causes. First, the enterprise market is constructed on an extended product cycle and it helps when planning these techniques to know what’s within the pipe publicly, but in addition from an investor standpoint the place the enterprise market in the end affords the larger monetary alternative.
To that finish, AMD confirmed what we primarily knew, with Zen Three based mostly Milan coming in ‘late 2020’.
Zen four based mostly Genoa has already been introduced because the CPU to energy the El Capitan supercomputer, and on this roadmap AMD has put it as popping out by 2022. We requested AMD for clarification, and so they acknowledged that on this kind of graph, we must always interpret it as the total stack of Genoa must be formally launched by the tip of 2022. Given AMD’s current 12-15 month cadence with the generations of EPYC, and the anticipated launch of Milan late this yr, we might count on to see Genoa in early 2022.
Astute customers would possibly discover that Milan / Zen Three has been listed as ‘7nm’, the place beforehand it was listed as ‘7nm+’. We’ve obtained a complete information put up on why AMD has made this modification, however the wanting it’s that AMD initially put ‘7nm+’ to imply ‘an advanced version of 7nm’. When TSMC named its EUV model of 7nm as N7+, folks had assumed they had been the identical, and AMD wished to make clear that Milan is on a model of 7nm, and the precise model will likely be disclosed at a later date. In the long run the corporate will keep away from utilizing ‘+’ so this doesn’t occur once more (!). We even have Genoa listed as a 5nm product.
Harder numbers about Milan and Genoa are anticipated to be unveiled nearer to their respective launch instances.
On the patron facet, AMD stated rather less, with its roadmap solely going out to Zen 3, which has the codename ‘Vermeer’ for the desktop product.
In this graph, we see that the Zen Three product right here is on the far proper, however so is the date – 2021. Does this imply Zen Three for shoppers is coming 2021? We requested AMD to make clear, and had been instructed that we must always interpret this as that the vary of Zen Three client merchandise, comparable to desktop CPUs, HEDT CPUs, cell APUs, and client APUs, ought to all be out there by the tip of 2021. The firm clarified that Zen Three will hit the patron market ‘later this year’, which means late 2020.
So right here comes a poignant query – what’s going to come first in 2020? Zen Three for enterprise is listed as ‘late 2020’, and Zen Three for client is ‘later this year’. AMD makes much more cash on its enterprise merchandise than its client merchandise, and whereas it enjoys a wholesome efficiency lead in each, it actually desires to push its market share in enterprise much more to drive house the larger monetary potential. With this in thoughts, I extremely suspect that given AMD’s lead within the client market, we’d see the corporate push extra of its Zen Three silicon into the enterprise market as a precedence, with solely a restricted 2020 client launch. I may very well be improper, however we’ll discover out nearer to the time.
Interested in additional of our AMD Financial Analyst Day 2020 Coverage? Click right here.
