AMD's Navi makes big debut at Computex 2019

The Computex show in Taipei, Taiwan is under way and that means big keynote addresses to kick things off. While there are plenty of exciting announcements to digest, one of the biggest came near the start of the show with AMD's keynote address from CEO Lisa Su, where she gave the company's next-generation graphics technology, Navi, its big debut.

After discussing the history of AMD's graphical developments and its most recent Radeon VII release, Su revealed the 7nm graphics technology that would be included in next-generation consoles like the PlayStation 5. But before then, it's going to make its appearance in a new-generation of graphics cards for desktops and laptops.

Navi is based on an RDNA architecture, which is different from Graphics Core Next, we're told. It supports PCIExpress 4.0 support right out of the gate,

RDNA, or Radeon DNA, is a brand new architecture that moves beyond GCN and will form the foundation of AMD graphics cards for the next 10 years. It has a new compute unit design which allows greater instructions per clock and improved efficiency. There's a new cache latency for improved bandwidth and reduced latency and its new graphics engine is streamlined to allow for higher clock speeds.

This leads to an overall increase of 1.25 x improvement in performance per clock compared to Vega, and 1.5 x improved performance per watt.

The new range is known as the 5000-series and though we didn't get a look at the entire product lineup, we were given a look at the performance capabilities of the RX 5700 and is around 10 percent faster than an Nvidia RTX 2070.

Navi will be set for release all over the world in July. We'll learn more during AMD's big address at E3 on June 10, with pricing, performance, and the technical capabilities of Navi cards all unveiled on the show floor.