After what seems like an eternity, AMD finally came out of the woodwork and officially announced launch dates for its highly anticipated CPUs and GPUs. The Zen 3 keynote will be on 10/8/2020 at 10am PT, and the RX 6000 "Big Navi" keynote is on 10/28/2020 at 10am PT.

What does this mean for AMD? On the CPU side of things, Zen 3 is rumored to be an absolute monster of an architecture.

Based on what we already know, Zen 3 will be based on an enhanced 7nm node from TSMC (either N7P or N7+), and focus significantly on increasing IPC performance through improvements to the L1-L3 caches, and perhaps even increased cache capacity.

For AMD's RDNA 2/Big Navi architectures, we've been anticipating their launch for months, and with Nvidia's Ampere GPUs now heading into the market, we all are hoping for good competition from AMD in the graphics card market.

The little we know about the RX 6000 series is that it will run on the latest 7nm node from TSMC with a near 50% performance-per-watt improvement over the RX 5000 series (RDNA 1). We believe AMD will change course and start competing with Nvidia's higher-end offerings like the RTX 3080. Whereas right now, AMD's flagship, the RX 5700 XT, competes in the mid-range only. For reference, in our Best Graphics Cards of 2020 overview, we set the RX 5700 XT just below the GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER.

Specs for the new PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X has also given us some useful information regarding RDNA 2's capabilities, both consoles could have up to RTX 2080 Ti performance for under 250W including the entire system. So we know RDNA 2 is a very capable architecture, but this is just for consoles – we will see different results on desktop variants in the future.