Advanced Micro Devices Inc. today debuted the world’s seven-nanometer graphics card for consumer devices along with power-efficient central processing units aimed at the same market.

The Radeon VII marks a big improvement over AMD’s previous top-end consumer card. It uses roughly the same amount of power but offers significantly more computational power.

Making the announcement at the CES consumer electronics show in Las Vegas, AMD said the Radeon VII provides an average of 29 percent higher gaming performance and 36 percent faster speeds for creative applications

The exact output varies between applications. The card runs the Adobe Premiere video editing application 29 percent faster than the previous-generation chip while providing as much as 62 percent more horsepower for OpenCL, a framework that’s among others used to train machine learning models.

The performance boost is a result of some major changes under the hood. Besides having denser circuitry, the Radeon VII packs twice as much high-bandwidth memory as its predecessor and can ingest a terabyte of data per second. 

Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, sees the card as a milestone for AMD’s efforts in the consumer market. 

“With Radeon VII, the company is more than doubling its highest consumer graphics card price, from $249 to $699, which is big,” Moorhead told SiliconANGLE.  “I believe the Radeon VII will perform best in the consumer creative space given its 16 gigabytes of high-bandwidth memory, but it will also perform well in gaming.”

Moorhead added that Radeon VII’s success will depend on how many the company can make and the importance gamers put on features such as Nvidia Corp.’s accelerated ray tracing. That’s a method of rendering realistic light and shadow effects that originated in the film industry. Nvidia, the market leader in the graphics processing market, last year introduced the first GPU with the ability to harness the technique for games.

Alongside the Radeon VII, AMD unveiled its third-generation Ryzen CPUs, which are also based on a seven-nanometer architecture. The series also introduces a number of other low-level changes. Most notably, the new CPUs consist of two separate dies: one circuit block contains the seven-nanometer cores that perform the computational heavy-lifting and another that handles data input and output.

These modifications give the series an edge in the efficiency department. On stage at CES, AMD Chief Executive Lisa Su (pictured) showed an unnamed eight-core processor model matching the speed of Intel’s top-shelf Core i9-9900K CPU while using about 30 percent less power.

AMD claimed this energy efficiency will enable laptops based on the chips to last half a day on a single charge. “If it can actually provide 12 hours of productive battery life, this would be big,” Moorhead noted. “It would be longer than any other notebook.”

AMD plans to ship the new Ryzen CPUs in the middle of the year, while the Radeon VII will launch next month.

Photo: AMD