AMD kicks off the CES 2020 show with an early keynote press conference that will reveal its most immediate product launch plans and what it has up its sleeves for the rest of the year. We’re expecting big things after last year’s bombshell announcements and a strong 2019 showing from the red team. CPUs, GPUs, and more besides could all make an appearance.
Here’s what you need to know to watch AMD’s CES 2020 press conference live, as it happens.
How to watch AMD’s CES press conference
AMD’s CES 2020 press conference starts on January 6, at 2 PM PST or 5PM EST. The best way to watch it is through its official stream, which you can find on YouTube here or use the embedded video above.
Worried you’ll forget or miss it somehow? AMD is offering to send out alert emails if you sign up to its member services.
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What to expect from AMD’s CES press conference
Hosted by AMD CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, the CES 2020 press conference promises to “demonstrate how [AMD] will make 2020 an unforgettable year for gamers, creators and mobile PC users.” While AMD no doubt has some surprises up its sleeve, this simple sentence gives us a good idea about what we are likely to see during AMD’s keynote address.
Following the launch of its Ryzen 3000 processors in July 2019, AMD is set to bring the Zen 2 architecture at the core of those chips to mobile hardware in 2020. CES is likely to see the first reveal of these new CPUs and the laptops they’re powering. These chips will likely combine Zen 2 CPU cores with Vega or Navi onboard graphics, for very capable mobile accelerated processing units (APU). These mobile processors will likely be the focus of the event.
Elsewhere on the CPU front, AMD is expected to launch its flagship third-generation Threadripper CPU in January, so we may see the monstrous 64-core Threadripper 3990X at CES too. There’s a possibility of an as-yet-announced 3970X with 48 cores too.
The Radeon Technology Group isn’t sitting idle, though. Following the launch of the RX 5500 XT in December, 2019, AMD is also expected to debut a brand new midrange card known as the RX 5600 XT. This GPU should slot between the existing 5500 XT and 5700, providing comparable performance to AMD’s once-top-tier card, the RX Vega 56, but at much lower power draw.
There’s also the chance we’ll hear about AMD’s long-rumored “Big Navi,” graphics card. This second-generation RDNA GPU has been whispered about since well before the RX 5000 series launched in 2019, and is reportedly called the “Nvidia Killer,” internally by AMD staffers. We don’t have much in the way of rumors about it beyond its given title, but there has been some suggestion that it could use the Navi 21 GPU, a graphics core that is said to be twice the size of, and twice as powerful as, the Navi 10 found in the RX 5700 and 5700 XT. It may even support hardware accelerated ray tracing.
Outside of the PC space, AMD may discuss its ambitions for the next-generations of consoles too. AMD APUs using Zen 2 CPU cores and a Navi GPU are expected to power both the Xbox Series X and the PlayStation 5, so we may learn more about their capabilities. Since AMD hardware sits at the heart of Google’s Stadia too, there’s always the chance we’ll be told about plans to scale up the service with new hardware in the future.
With Intel and Nvidia expected to make major hardware and software reveals of their own at CES 2020, the next week may paint a very different picture of what 2020 holds for all of them.
