AMD expected to unveil 7nm Ryzens and Navi GPUs in January

Forthcoming 7nm Ryzen CPUs and GPUs will be made by TSMC rather than GlobalFoundries

AMD is expected to unveil its first 7nm Ryzen CPUs in January at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The Ryzen unveiling will be made alongside the launch of a series of new graphics cards, which are expected to be based on AMD's Navi architecture. They, too, will also be built to a 7nm process architecture.

The CPUs and GPUs will be unveiled by CEO Lisa Su, who will be delivering a keynote address at the event.

"AMD is transforming the future of computing in our ever-expanding digital world and revolutionising the $35 billion gaming industry," said Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of CTA, the company behind CES.

He continued: "We look forward to Dr Su's keynote as she paints a picture of the next-generation of computing that will help redefine the future of gaming and virtual entertainment."

The early release of 7nm Ryzen CPUs could well shake up the PC and server market, especially with Intel struggling to make the leap from 14nm to 10nm, and AMD freed from its contract with GlobalFoundries.

This has enabled it to source chips from TSMC instead of the foundry business spun-out of AMD 10 years ago. It also makes it easier for AMD to ramp-up production.

The 7nm Ryzen CPUs will be built to the Zen 2 architecture (as opposed to Zen in first generation Ryzen and Zen+ in the 12nm Ryzens released this year). They will also be the first AMD PC CPUs to be made by TSMC in preference to GlobalFoundries.

It has struggled to keep up with successive generations of CPUs, both as part of AMD and as an independent company, and recently announced that it would be sticking with its 12nm and 14nm process architecture technology, rather than compete head-on against Intel, Samsung and TSMC at the cutting edge.

The decision will help the company to improve its profitability in the short term but will almost certainly leave it more vulnerable in the longer term, especially with a slew of well-resourced Chinese semiconductor companies looking to make their way up the food chain.

The graphics cards reveal, meanwhile, is expected to be the first look at the Navi architecture slated to replace the Vega architecture at the high-end of AMD's graphics hierarchy.

Like Vega, it will utilise expensive high bandwidth 2 (HBM2) memory and be based on 7nm process architectures. Again, it is expected to be manufactured by TSMC.