2021 will probably be a good year for AMD. But we expect more focus on rounding out the Zen 3 and Big Navi lineup, not the introduction of Zen 4 or a successor to Navi.
2020 has been a wild year, and yet it still went almost according to plan for AMD. Or at least that perceived plan as laid out by the momentum of its Zen processors. Aside from some inventory shortages in the latter half of 2020, AMD has shown little sign of slowing down, and that may make 2021 another big year for Team Red. If we’re being realistic, new components are what we’re excited for. Even though AMD’s Ryzen 5000-series CPUs and Radeon RX 6000 series graphics GPUs have only recently hit the market, there’s still plenty we can look forward to. It’s too soon to get excited about a new generation of products, but there’s plenty of room for AMD to fill out its catalog. Even though Zen 3 CPUs are here, it’s not nearly a complete lineup. The Ryzen 5 5600X, Ryzen 7 5800X, Ryzen 9 5900X and 5950X are likely only a small fraction of the models we’ll see. We can expect to see more budget options in the Ryzen 3 line, as well as lower-power, non-X variants without factory overclocking. There should be some APUs coming to round out the types of computers AMD processors can power. And, we’d also expect some early 2021 announcements of Ryzen 5000 mobile processors to power laptops. AMD unveiled a suite of Ryzen 4000 mobile processors at CES 2020, so we wouldn’t be surprised to see new ones at CES 2021, where AMD is scheduled to have a keynote. Zen 2 was already impressive enough in mobile devices, so Zen 3 is all but certain to continue wowing us with desktop-like performance in thin and light ultrabooks. Similarly, AMD still has some ground to cover in its graphics processor stack. The Radeon RX 6900 XT has the high-end of the market covered for now, and the Radeon RX 6800 may be at the bottom of the stack right now, but it’ll surely have a 6700 and 6700 XT below it at some point in the near future, perhaps even as soon as January.
