Another price jump, now in AMD GPUs

While speaking to the Chinese press, Sapphire PR manager revealed that AMD is working on two Navi SKUs: a 399 USD variant to compete against GeForce RTX 2060 and 499 USD model as an alternative to RTX 2070.

The interview also shed some light on the new Navi architecture. According to the same manager, it will not support ray-tracing on a hardware level.

PCB analysis

Present rumors are that Navi chips announcement will be at June 2019, and that they will compete with RTX 2060 and may be 2070, but not more.

Due to high 7nm costs price will be around 10-15% lower than Nvidia counterparts, AMD is not expecting to get any significant market share with this chips, as main designation of Navi development is towards new consoles.

Both Xbox and Playstation new consoles will be extremely underpowered and are expected to run 4K titles with low graphics at mostly 30fps.

AMD stopped a competition of their own to "guess" the Cinebench results of upcoming Zen 2 chips - and it might well be that this competition was contributing to the somewhat overly optimistic seeming rumors. I'm not inclined to believe > 5GHz 16-core Ryzens, yet, but should they materialize on the shop benches, I'll happily buy one :-)