Mainstream AMD CES 2023 Live Blog: Dr. Lisa Su launches the biggest tech event of the year

CES 2023 is here, and with it, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su is scheduled to give the event’s opening keynote address on Wednesday, January 4 at 6:30 p.m. PST.

It will be the first CES keynote address AMD has given in over two years, and we’re on the ground covering the event live, as it happens. What will AMD announce? Nobody’s guessing, but we’re expecting Zen 4 mobile processors and maybe some new graphics cards too now that Nvidia announces the RTX 408… I mean the RTX 4070 Ti.

Will we see an AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT? We hope so, and we also hope to see AMD put out some new laptop hardware to compete with Intel and Nvidia on this front as well.

Last year we saw the debut of the Ryzen 6000 series, but due to supply chain issues, we haven’t seen many laptops with new AMD chipsets hit the market. But with the new year comes new possibilities, so we’re excited to bring you the news as it happens here in Las Vegas!

If you want to catch up with us, you can watch the live stream of the event below.

Greetings tech heads! This is John Loeffler, Computing Editor at TechRadar, on the ground in rather cold Sin City, USA. Our crew and I are getting ready to head to the Venetian to watch AMD’s CES 2023 Keynote headline, so we’ll bring you updates as they happen, so stay tuned for all things AMD!

So here we are at the Palazzo Ballroom at The Venetian Hotel as the crowd starts filtering ahead of AMD’s flagship title. We have about 15 minutes to go now!

So what are we getting tonight? New 3D processors V-cache? Radeon RX 7800 XT? Both? We’ll know soon enough!

With 10 minutes left I can say we are definitely hoping for some new processors with 3D V-Cache. The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D is one of the best processors out there, even with the latest Ryzen 7000-series chips.

We’d like to see what the 3D V-Cache will look like on the Zen 4, and hopefully we’ll get a taste tonight.

What about graphics cards? The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX is the best graphics card AMD has ever put out, and it’s better than the RTX 4080 in my opinion, especially for the price.

With the RTX 4070 Ti announced, there is hope that AMD will make the RX 7800 XT announcement tonight to make AMD more competitive in the GPU space.

Then, of course, there’s a mobile phone to consider. We could see some new mobile CPUs and GPUs as well, which is good because based on what we’ve seen here, the new RTX 40 series laptops are some formidable machines.

Eventually, we’ll know in about five minutes according to the announcer here at the event, so stay tuned!

And here we go!

CTA President Gary Shapiro is now introducing Su, and to be honest, Shapiro would probably be happy to speak to an entire dance floor after the past two years.

Dr. Su takes the stage!

Offers AMD Ryzen 7040 series processors for laptops, including AMD XDNA AI processing, RDNA 3 GPUs, and more.

30+ battery life when playing video? That’s quite a claim. We’re definitely looking forward to testing that out.

The first laptops shipped in March across the Ultrabook and Gaming Laptop categories.

Introducing Panos Panay, EVP and Chief Product Officer of Microsoft, and getting some dalliances at conferences.

Speaking of Xbox, the AMD processor and GPU in the Xbox Series X (and PlayStation 5) are like two generations old and the GPU is as powerful as the RX 6600 XT, but capable of 60fps @ 4K with ray tracing. That’s the power of knowing ahead of time what type of hardware you’re programming and being able to improve on the hardware.

Well, they’re talking about the “future” of AI and Windows, maybe Windows 12? Lots of AI workloads no one expected, more AI integration into Windows in the future now that hardware is around?

The talk of hybrid work now, meanwhile tech companies everywhere are demanding a return to the office. Which one will win?

HP President and CEO Enrique Lores is blowing up hybrid work (preaching!), as well as pointing out the boom in the freelance workforce in the US, so yes, we can get better webcams (or you can buy one from our best webcams list)!

Well, it’s time to play!

So do we get processors or graphics cards? Give us both!

AMD Radeon RX 7600M XT and Ryzen 7945 HX, which should definitely help AMD grab some market share in the gaming laptop space, especially among gaming laptops.

I’m definitely excited about the Lenovo Legion Pro series. Legion gaming laptops are a sleeping power that a lot of people seem to be missing out on, which is unfortunate. Lenovo Legion 5 Pro is one of my all-time favorite gaming laptops.

Ok X3D CPUs! Let’s go!

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D!

Ryzen 9 7950X3D with 144MB cache, holy hell!

The 7950X3D may be the chip that displaces 13900K, at least for gaming. I’m not sure Intel cares, but it’s something gamers will love.

So we’ll get three X3D chipsets, the 7800X3D, 7900X3d, and 7950 X3D, all due out in February.

No graphics cards (yet), unfortunately.

It wouldn’t be CES without talking about medical technology, and it’s probably more important than a lot of the other stuff we’ve seen so far, but it’s hard to make medical devices flashy. In the end, I’m glad we’re not talking about the meta/omniverse.

I still don’t know exactly what adaptive computing means, to be honest.

No, don’t do that, dr. Soo…not Metaverse.

Former NASA astronaut Dr. Cady Coleman took the stage to talk about space exploration and AMD, a John Loeffler-bait if anything.

Percy! Oh damn, RIP Oppy. This person still stings.

Speaking of space wizards, before anyone dismisses the Apollo guidance computer as being less powerful than a calculator, don’t. The AGC is one of the most amazing engineering feats ever accomplished by mankind. NASA landed astronauts on the Moon in a tin can with electronic cords running through the rings to act as a memory core that cannot be triggered by solar radiation outside of Earth’s magnetic field. It’s an amazingly cool solution to the intractable problem of spaceflight.

Data centers, TechRadar Pro’s favorite topic, are going to be even more important for cloud gaming and all sorts of next-generation cloud technologies in the next decade, but oh my god, they’re producing carbon emissions like no other.

Avatar: The Way of Water, also known as A Reminder to Never Doubt James Cameron’s Box Office Prowess. Who else can you trust with a $200+ million budget?

And this is a file!

In the end, we got roughly what we expected from AMD’s keynote, even if it wasn’t quite what we hoped (I think AMD should save something for March/April).

The new Ryzen 7040 series processors should help AMD break into Intel’s mobile processor market if it can ship enough chips to OEMs, something supply chain issues have somewhat hampered for the Ryzen 6000-series chips. Interestingly, AMD isn’t playing with the 8000-series processor naming as it initially planned (the even-numbered series were supposed to be portable, while the odd-numbered ones were supposed to be desktop).

The RDNA 3 mobile GPUs will also give consumers some great options for budget laptops, though it’s notable that AMD compared its 7600M XT mobile GPU with the mobile RTX 3060, which is the latest generation of mobile GPU. It remains to be seen how well it stacks up against the new RTX 40 series.

Finally, 3D V-cache is coming to desktop game processors, something we’ve been waiting to see since late August. We also get three chipsets, starting with the 8-core Ryzen 7 7800X3D, along with the 12-core Ryzen 9 7900X3D and the 16-core Ryzen 9 7950X3D, with the last one getting 144MB 3D V-cache, which is a whopper.

We’ll get our hands on a lot of new laptops this week (hopefully), so even if we can’t officially benchmark them, hopefully we’ll get a better idea of ​​what kind of gaming performance we can expect from these new processors.

Check back over the next couple of days for our hands-on impressions and more from CES 2023!