AMD's CES show will highlight upcoming Ryzen processors and Radeon graphics

AMD's CEO Lisa Su at CES 2020
(Image credit: AMD)

AMD has announced that it will host a livestream on January 4th to highlight some of its upcoming products including Ryzen processors and Radeon graphics. The Product Premiere Livestream coincides with CES and will be hosted by AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su. It will be streamed via amd.com.

In some years the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) can be on the light side when it comes to the amount of new PC tech compared to a show like Computex, but this year AMD looks to have quite a few things to show off including new CPUs, GPUs and mobile products. If we’re lucky, we might even get a tease of AMD’s Zen 4 or RDNA 3 GPUs, both of which are due to arrive later in 2022.

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Before we get to Zen 4, we have AMD’s V-Cache equipped CPUs to look forward to. These CPUs feature a stacked vertical cache.  AMD has already demonstrated a Ryzen 9 5900X with a huge 192MB of L3 cache, compared to the 64MB of the base model. AMD claims this alone can boost gaming performance by as much as 15%, which would help them compete with the strong gaming performance on offer from Intel’s 12th Gen CPUs. It remains to be seen if AMD will market these CPUs as a refresh with something like the XT branding, or whether they'll be named the Ryzen 6000 series.

We can expect AMD to talk about its refreshed mobile processors based on the 6nm Zen 3+ architecture. The CPU part of the chips won’t be revolutionary, likely featuring higher clocks and improved power consumption thanks to the new process. Far more interesting is the long-awaited inclusion of RDNA 2 graphics. We can only speculate as to how these chips will perform but given the age of the outgoing Vega graphics, they could provide a lot of graphics horsepower for your buck.

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On the Radeon front, we can expect to see the reveal of the Radeon RX 6500 XT and RX 6400 GPUs. If they’re priced right, they could sell very well, but, assuming they launch with 4GB of VRAM and a 64-bit bus, we won’t be setting very high expectations for them. Though if you’re into esports or play less demanding titles, they could be worth keeping an eye on.

AMD has had a good time over the last few years, but with Intel roaring back with its 12th Gen range, plus its pending entry into the GPU market, AMD is probably feeling more pressure than it has since the launch of the original Zen back in 2017. We’ll be tuning in to see what the company has planned for 2022.

Chris Szewczyk
Hardware Writer

Chris' gaming experiences go back to the mid-nineties when he conned his parents into buying an 'educational PC' that was conveniently overpowered to play Doom and Tie Fighter. He developed a love of extreme overclocking that destroyed his savings despite the cheaper hardware on offer via his job at a PC store. To afford more LN2 he began moonlighting as a reviewer for VR-Zone before jumping the fence to work for MSI Australia. Since then, he's gone back to journalism, enthusiastically reviewing the latest and greatest components for PC & Tech Authority, PC Powerplay and currently Australian Personal Computer magazine and PC Gamer. Chris still puts far too many hours into Borderlands 3, always striving to become a more efficient killer.