Frank Azor, AMD’s Gaming Chief, spoke with HotHardware about the next-generation Ryzen and Radeon products set to hit the market in 2022.
During the discussion, Frank revealed some interesting details about AMD’s next-generation and forthcoming products. Following AMD’s CES 2022 speech, we all had a few questions, so here are a few that were answered during the interview:
AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT Graphics Card – Aiming To Be The Most Accessible Gamer GPU & Hinting at an 8 GB Variant?
AMD has made some odd choices for its first 6nm GPU, starting with the Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics card, including the addition of only 4 GB memory. Frank notes that the decision to go 4 GB for this particular SKU was made for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, it is an entry-level SKU with a price tag of $199 US, and GPU RAM is currently highly expensive, even before factoring in the cost of the new 6nm technology.
Going 4 GB was the proper choice, according to experts, because technologies like FSR and RSR augment the card’s performance. However, users should not expect that 4 GB will be the only version of the 6500 XT available in the future. This points to an upcoming 8 GB release, albeit we’ll have to wait and see when that happens.
AMD further says that the 4 GB move is intended to combat crypto miners and that while software attempts to determiners have been unsuccessful, this hard-coded method (4 GB VRAM) will make the RX 6500 XT an undesirable option for miners. The card will also be available in large quantities at launch, allowing AMD to position the 6500 XT as the most accessible and affordable gaming graphics card in the previous two years.
Our main goal was to build Most Accessible GPU with strong 1080p performance.
Our goal was to get to a disruptive price point at a time when GPUs are very expensive and every major GPU that has come out in the last year or two has been I think over 300 dollars right or at least 299 and above. […] We set the goal of 199 to be able to do that and memory prices have sky-rocketed very honestly and it’s extremely challenging if not impossible to get to 199 in today’s market with an 8 GB graphics card.
And to be able to design a card that would perform very well with all these modern technologies and achieve this price point and for our partners to be able to build a lot of them and we want them to build a lot of them, we did the performance testing between 8 Gigs and 4 GB, we factor in things like FSR and RSR, and the truth is that with those technologies supplementing the performance of the card and the fact that we are not going after 4k or 1440, we are going after 1080p medium to high settings, we think going with 4 gigs was the right decision.
It’s also very unattractive to have four gigabytes if you’re a crypto miner so there’s a significant benefit of going 4 GB, which we think is going to give the availability of our GPU and market as compared to every other option out in the market our there right now. We will see if that materializes but we are planning to come to market with a strong amount of supply, we think we have done everything right, we hit the right price point. We think people will be pleased with the performance when they see the real performance of the card versus the perceived performance of four gigabytes when supplemented with FSR and RSR and hopefully will be able to find in the market. I am optimistic that people will appreciate the decisions that we made here and I am very confident in the decision we made but I learn something new in this market every day so we will see what happens.
I will also say that don’t assume that four gigabytes will be the only graphics configurations of the 6500 XT that will ever exist.
I think up to now most if not all attempts to try and do things to ward off miners haven’t succeeded that much, these software hacks and things have been very quick and easy to overcome. We are all trying to figure it out, this is an attempt, let’s see if it works out. This is like a hard-coded thing, this is like a limitation, you really can’t even, I don’t even think you can reasonably mine Ether with 4 Gigabytes of memory. If it works out, if we are right, this could be the perfect gamer and gamer-only graphics card. It’s very affordable, it’s got all modern technologies, it’s got a memory config that hopefully miners will find unappealing, and it’s a very small form factor in its shape and very aggressively priced and we hope that there’ll be a lot of them on shelves. Every graphics card has been hated in the last two years so I am hoping we nail this one and people will love us for it. We’ll see.
AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D – Only One V-Cache Option But In The Best Ryzen Chip For Gamers
Frank also discusses the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which was recently announced, and why it is the only CPU choice with V-Cache. The Ryzen 7 5800X is believed to be the best processor in the Ryzen 5000 stack that is solely designed for gaming. As a result, it was a no-brainer to boost game performance even further by including next-gen technology like 3D V-Cache. However, due to the CPU’s 105W power budget, some compromises had to be made. They had to give up clock rates due to power and thermal limits, which explains why the CPU is clocked lower, but more crucially, the benefits of V-Cache exceeded the frequency for gamers.
Even so, the CPU can be overclocked to achieve greater clock speeds. In terms of other SKUs and whether we’ll see V-Cache on future generations, AMD wants to see how well the V-Cache chip is embraced and the initial market response, and if consumers and, of course, AMD see value in it, it will be deployed further.
It’s a technology that today is benefitting games and gamers so we wanted to put in on the best gaming processor and that’s the 5800.
There aren’t many games that get much more uplift out of an 8 core processor and the 5800 is really like the ideal gaming processor of all of them. When you move up the stack, you are getting more cores and it’s allowing you to do more with the processor, you can be encoding, decoding, you can be streaming, you can be running a lot of things in the background when you are gaming but there aren’t many games that take advantage of 8 or even 4 cores at a given time.
By putting it on a package like the 5800, it allows to give you more performance per core of those eight cores because we can focus the technology on those eight cores, we have a TDP limit to fit within so that’s able to give us overall better performance per every one of those cores and there’s honestly a price factor too. V-Cache is an expensive technology and it’s pretty awesome. It’s a technology that today is benefitting games and gamers so we wanted to put in on the best gaming processor and that’s the 5800. When you see it come to market, it will be something that folks will be able to find you know accessible to them and they are going to be getting a technology that will benefit what that processor that that processor was exclusively designed for, most efficiently designed for, which is gaming. So those are the main reasons for it.
The other thing is that you’re probably wondering why we aren’t putting it on every single SKU out there like this cutting edge technology, you know its starting here, we want to see how well it is adopted and if it is adopted and people love it and they see the value in it, then we will probably deploy it further. But new stuff is hard to be very honest, it’s really hard and this is new and there’s a reason so many people are excited about it and it’s so disruptive to the industry.
You are putting more things on the chip, something’s gotta give right, nothing’s free and for nothing’s free from not just dollars, I mean from a thermal from a power perspective and so on and we are within a 105W so the performance uplift that the V-Cache is providing significantly outweighs the frequency and again, something’s gotta give, so that’s the high-level explanation I can give.
AMD AM5 Platform To Follow AM4’s Legacy, Not Just Designed With Ryzen 7000 ‘Zen 4’ In Mind But Future Generations Too
Finally, we now know more about the AMD AM5 platform’s long-term plans, which will debut in the second half of 2022 alongside AMD Ryzen 7000 ‘Zen 4’ Desktop CPUs. It’s been said that AMD’s AM4 platform has been transformational and that it’s simply astonishing what it’s accomplished in its nearly 5-year life cycle. There’s nothing like it, from Ryzen 1000 to Ryzen 50003D, and the cost of ownership versus the competition has been a game-changer in the consumer DIY category.
While Frank isn’t committing to anything, he hopes AM5 will continue the history of AM4, which lasted four, five, or even more years in the DIY market.
The other guys give you a socket for like a year, maybe two years, so the total cost of ownership of AM4 AM5, there’s just nothing that compares to it.
When you look at what we’ve accomplished with AM4, it’s unprecedented for any other company other than AM4. We have remained on the AM4 socket for four generations, maybe more on that, like five or six years, it’s remarkable, there’s no other x86 PC platform that has accomplished that.
If you try to jam something into a socket that you planned seven years ago right because we have to plan this stuff 2+ years before you ever see it, you would just end up being uncompetitive. So what AM5 gives us is the ability to put not just everything you’re going to see in Zen 4 but it’s going to give us the ability to put the future generations in there as well so why go to AM5?
Well look if you are sitting on a Ryzen 1000, 2000, or even a 3000 processor and you are thinking about maybe moving to a 5000 or even to a 3D V-Cache one, we are putting this out there so that you can understand that hey, something else is coming in a few quarters. That should be welcomed as hey guys thanks for giving us heads instead of not telling me anything I go in and I buy into something you know with an AM4 and then six months later, it’s potentially outdated.
So the fact that we shared this thing and this information are because we’re trying to do right as well as showing off our goods and that we are making progress on our roadmap, that’s the reason for AM5. AM4 is a 7-year-old socket now if not older than that and for everything that we have planned for the next 7, 5 years, you can’t deliver than in the AM4 socket. For that reason, we have to go AM5, it is going to be essential to enable all the technology/innovation that we have planned for you over the next five years.
That’s just in the next couple of years, we are looking at things three four-plus years from now, I can’t give you a comment on the longevity of the socket, please I’m not giving anybody a commitment, all I am telling you is that you get to a point where you hit a brick wall as to how far you can go and AM4 is amazing, it’s amazing! how far we have been able to bring it.
We got a socket for four-five years, we will hopefully be able to accomplish something similar with AM5. The other guys give you a socket for like a year, maybe two years, so the total cost of ownership of AM4 AM5, there’s just nothing that compares to it and we know transitions are always tough, we understand that but I hope people can maintain perspective appreciate what we are accomplishing.
Overall, Frank provided some excellent information throughout the conversation, and HotHardware deserves credit for hosting it.
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