Vega 7nm GPU with 60 CUs, coming Feb. 7th for $699

At its CES 2019 keynote, AMD's CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, unveiled AMD's first 7nm gaming GPU, the Radeon VII (seven).

Based on 12nm Polaris GPU

As expected, rumored, and leaked earlier this week, AMD has now officially released its latest mid-range graphics card meant to put a bit more pressure on Nvidia's GTX 1060 during this holiday season, the Radeon RX 590.

The same RX 580 Nitro+ Special Edition design

Sapphire's RX 590 Nitro+ Special Edition has been spotted online and comes with the same design as the RX 580 Nitro+ Special Edition - confirming earlier reports that we are looking at just a die shrink of the original Polaris chip.

Should be launching this month

A box shot has pretty much confirmed that AMD is likely to soon launch the 12nm Polaris-based Radeon RX 590, which could bring around 10 to 15 percent performance boost compared to the RX 580, at least depending on the actual GPU clock AMD AIB partners hit on their cards.

The brand is coming back

According to rumors floating around, Asus will be returning its ROG Strix brand with the Radeon RX 590 graphics card.

The RX 570 with higher clocks

AMD has rather silently introduced a new SKU in China, the Radeon RX 580 2048SP, which is pretty much the Radeon RX 570 but with a slightly higher GPU boost clock.

Crimson Canyon

A certain number of Intel NUC SKUs have 10nm processors inside and they are codenamed Crimson Canyon. This was confirmed to us by Brandt Guttridge, general manager of desktop product marketing, at the last Intel desktop event and the only other notebook machine that features 10nm is the Lenovo Ideapad 330 notebook, available only in China. 

Zen and Vega for $55

AMD has announced the availability of its Athlon 200GE APU which comes with two Zen CPU cores paired up with Radeon Vega 3 graphics, all for $55.

Lack of competition dictates

Lack of competition is what allows Nvidia to price products however high it wants to and even lets its AIB partners go a little bit crazier with their custom cards. RTX is definitely a step forward in computer graphics but it will take time for RayTracing to become really necessary and get down to reasonably priced markets.

AMD cannot challenge this

It will be extremely hard and almost impossible for AMD to stay relevant in performance and high end gaming. With the introduction of Geforce Turing based 20 series RTX cards, Nvidia is putting in place a hard to reach distance between AMD Radeon graphics and Geforce. When we say Nvidia will rule high end in 2019, we of course mean the rest of 2018 too.