Thanks to a slate of new products that began rolling out in early 2017, Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) is more competitive today than it's been in years. Its Ryzen chips compete with Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) in the PC CPU market, its Vega GPUs go head to head with NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA), and its EPYC server CPUs are in the early stages of clawing back market share.
AMD announced a slew of product updates on Monday. The Ryzen family will expand in February with desktop chips featuring integrated graphics, followed by the launch of second-generation Ryzen chips in April. On the graphics front, mobile gamers will have Vega as a discrete graphics option in 2018. It's shaping up to be an eventful year for the perennial underdog.
Image source: AMD.
Expanding Ryzen
When Ryzen first launched in March, the only chips available were desktop processors without any integrated graphics. This meant that the addressable market for Ryzen was limited to those with discrete graphics cards.
The launch of Ryzen Mobile late last year expanded Ryzen into the laptop market, providing a Ryzen CPU paired with Vega graphics. The missing piece has been desktop chips with built-in graphics. That will change in February when AMD fills in this gap in its lineup.
The first Ryzen APUs, featuring Vega graphics, are expected to be available on Feb. 12. The name of the game here is "good enough" gaming. The company claims that the chips will provide enough performance for gaming at a 1080p resolution. Any discrete graphics card will blow these chips out of the water, but there's certainly a market for budget gaming PCs.
Following this launch, AMD plans to refresh its Ryzen lineup with the Zen+ architecture during the second quarter. Zen+ will be built on a 12nm process, compared to the 14nm process employed for the current batch of Ryzen chips. Zen+ is a revision, not a major architectural revamp, so performance improvements won't be earth-shattering.
Big changes will come with the launch of the Zen 2 architecture, probably sometime in 2019. The Zen 2 design is already complete, and AMD promises improvements "in multiple dimensions." Chips based on Zen 2 will be built on a 7nm process, and the performance improvements will likely be significant. The follow-up to Zen 2, Zen 3, is also on track, expected to be launched by 2020.
Bringing Vega to laptops
AMD is also expanding its addressable market when it comes to graphics. The company launched its discrete desktop Vega GPUs in August, its reentry into the high-end graphics card market. This launch hasn't put a dent in NVIDIA's dominance, but it's certainly better than having no horse in the race at all.