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AMD Unveils New Chips, Touts Advantages Over Intel In PCs, Servers

LAS VEGAS — Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) on Wednesday promoted a new series of processors for personal computers and servers that take advantage of its bet on cutting-edge, 7-nanometer process technology. AMD stock fell 2.7% to close at 20.19 on the stock market today.

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In a keynote speech at CES 2019, the industry's annual trade show, AMD Chief Executive Lisa Su said this year is when the company will prove it made the right call with 7-nanometer chips.

The industry measures circuits on computer chips in nanometers, which are one-billionth of a meter. Rival Intel (INTC) has struggled with smaller chip dimensions and is shifting to 10-nanometer scale semiconductors.

"A couple of years ago we saw some fundamental bottlenecks to increasing computing performance. And we made some big bets about where we thought the industry was going to go," Su said. "And 2019 is a key year when we see some of those big bets really pay off."

One of those bets was 7-nanometer scale chips.

First New 7-Nanometer Chip

On Wednesday, AMD introduced its Radeon 7 chip, the world's first 7-nanometer gaming-graphics processing unit. It boasts 25% more performance at the same power as its predecessor. Radeon 7 will be available on Feb. 7 for $699.

"Gamers will be really happy with Radeon 7 and how it performs vs. the competition," Su said.

AMD also previewed its third-generation Ryzen desktop processor and second-generation Epyc processor for servers and data centers. Both are based on 7-nanometer technology. AMD plans to launch both in mid-2019.

During AMD's keynote, the company conducted performance tests of latest Ryzen and Epyc processors against current offerings from Intel. The tests indicated that AMD's chips were faster and more power efficient.

AMD stock hit an intraday peak of 34.14 in mid-September. Just after Christmas, AMD stock fell as low as 16.03 and has begun to trend upward along with the rest of the market. The all-time high for AMD stock was 48.50, reached in June 2000.

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