Yes, AMD has a roadmap and it showed it to us. It goes like this. Ryzen is followed by Ryzen 2 and then Ryzen 3 except that AMD is not really sticking to that roadmap. It is about to launch what it calls Ryzen + which is an optimized and improved original Ryzen. Back in the summer of 2017 I had a chance to have a short chat with Mike Clark, the man behind the Ryzen/Epyc design.
Mike and his team are the chaps who brought the Ryzen to life and did day to day stuff for that product development. The person most of you have heard of is Jim Keller who was overseeing the overall Ryzen roadmap. So, Jim - with his team - is planning the future Ryzen/EPYC product roadmap. His team did some ground work on the few next Ryzens.
Again, Mike Clark finished the job and launched two product generations - Ryzen and the server based EPYC - and he and his great team should be praised for it. They launched probably the best two CPU product generations in the recent history of AMD. The company gets to see another day and is finally making some gains. If this is not clear enough, when we mention Mike Clark, we do know that he didn’t single handedly create the whole chip and we, at Fudzilla, have enormous respect for the army of engineers, product managers and other people involved who helped create this product.
Intel reacted with six core mainstream Coffee Lake, eighteen core high end CPU to counter the work of AMD, but again stayed rather competitive. AMD is back in the game and that is what matters as competition brings the pricing down.
So when Mike Clark mentions a Ryzen 5, that doesn’t really mean much than a Powerpoint place holder. That chip is so far away that AMD is not even sure how a transistor will look. Simple math proves that if all goes well Ryzen 3 might launch at 2021.
You have to consider that after every integer Ryzen comes one plus product as this is manageable. So, with that in mind, Ryzen 5 could be as faraway as 2025. This is us being realistic and conservative and thinking that there will be a "plus" product every year. Even without plus products, Ryzen 5 cannot launch before 2022, or four years from now.
The lithography and chip manufacturing industry has had a lot of challenges to shrink transistors and very soon, the latest at 5nm in a few years, it is unclear how fast and how further can the semi industry shrink the transistors.
The Ryzen 2000 series or Ryzen plus, scheduled to launch later this month, will be better but marginally as there is just so much you can optimize. We will have to wait for the next years of Ryzen 2 to see what 7nm can get out of this design. People are suggesting that GlobalFoundries/Samsung 7nm is as good as Intel’s 10nm so as long as Intel manages to have 10nm parts in 2019, Ryzen 2 will have a hell of a ride. As a former CEO of Intel said once, only the paranoid survive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=768&v=iQ_4C2TKHQ0
