All Ryzen: Q&A with AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su

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The biggest news of the annual Computex trade show came from AMD: the company is poised to launch its next generation Zen 2 microarchitecture, along with updates to its Ryzen and EPYC product lines. AMD is going all-in with its chiplet CPU architecture, as well as with its new RDNA graphics architecture for the upcoming Navi graphics product family. After AMD’s keynote, we joined a small roundtable of journalists to put questions to AMD’s CEO, Dr. Lisa Su.

The key announcement of the day was the consumer processor line, Ryzen, is being updated with higher core performance, 7nm chiplets, and up to twelve cores for less than half of the price of Intel’s twelve core processor. AMD presented benchmarks which showed raw single thread performance parity at lower frequencies, and the company promotes that its CPUs can equal Intel’s performance at lower power due to the process node technology and features within the chip. These processors will be launched on 7/7, and will also be the first consumer processors to offer PCIe 4.0 connectivity. Along with the CPU, AMD also lifted a corner to its upcoming Navi graphics processor lineup, stating that initial products will be targeting RTX 2070 performance with the new RDNA architecture, with the RX 5700 family coming in July as well.

Questions for Dr. Su came across a series of topics: AMD’s roadmaps, discussions about process technology, a number covering AMD’s market prowess as well as tackling incumbents, and even some discussion on where AMD is headed in the future.

The roundtable was around six members of the press, CEO Dr. Lisa Su, Head of RTG David Wang, and other AMD senior staff on hand to answer questions directly. As with our other roundtable transcriptions, the wording may be edited to make it more readable, as well as grouping questions together based on topic. Where possible and known, the question provider is noted.

This roundtable occured before the E3 announcements, and so some questions have been removed as they were answered during AMD's event there.

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