AMD CEO: a high-end Navi GPU is on the way

In an interview during CES, AMD CEO Lisa Su promises that a high-end Navi GPU is on the way. The market for high-end video cards in particular is important to AMD, she said, without giving further details.

“You can expect that we’re going to have a high-end Navi, and it’s important to have it. The discrete graphics market, especially for the high-end, is very important to us,” Su said in response to a question from PC World at CES. AnandTech publishes a transcript of the question-answer conversation with various media. Su made the promise that she normally does not respond to inquiries about unannounced products. She also said customers can expect Radeon cards to receive ray tracing support during 2020, though she emphasized that she believes ray tracing development in general is still at an early stage.

At CES AMD introduced the Radeon RX 5600 XT based on Navi 10, a midrange card that should fill the gap between the 5500 XT and 5700. Some had hoped AMD would make an announcement for the high-end market. Currently AMD has no serious competitors for Nvidia’s fastest cards.

The AMD CEO also announced during the CES conversation that Navi will also end up in apus. The Ryzen 4000 Mobile APUs that AMD announced at the fair still have to make do with Vega chips instead of video chips based on the RDNA architecture. According to Su, the Vega architecture is mature and optimized so that it was always the plan to combine it with Zen 2 for Ryzen 4000 Mobile.