The launch of AMD’s upcoming graphics card “Big Navi” is creeping ever closer, but the latest information claims that a launch will not take place as early as September or October. New rumors, compiled by Wccftech, instead place the launch window in November, when only cards of reference design appear to be available.
Earlier rumors regarding the specifications of the upcoming card are also strengthened, where 80 computing units and a total of 5,120 stream processors seem to be the recipe for the top model in the RDNA 2 family. On the memory side, a doubling from the Radeon RX 5700 XT with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory over a 512-bit wide bus is on the agenda, where HBM2 variants are dedicated to professional use.
Graphics family AMD RDNA 2
Characteristics | Navi 10 | Navi 21 (Big Navi) | Navi 22 | Navi 23 |
---|---|---|---|---|
product | Radeon RX 5700 XT | RX 6900 (XT)* | Pro 6600M* | RX 6500 (XT)* |
Circuit surface | 251 mm² | 505 mm² | 340 mm² | 240 mm² |
CU devices | 40 | 80* | Unknown | Unknown |
Streamprocessorer | 2 560 | 5 120* | Unknown | Unknown |
Memory | 8 GB GDDR6 | 16 GB GDDR6* | Unknown | Unknown |
Memory bus | 256 bits | 512 bits * | Unknown | Unknown |
Architecture | RDNA | RDNA 2 | RDNA 2 | RDNA 2 |
* Speculative specifications based on leaked data.
According to the new rumors, the production will take place on TSMC’s second generation process of 7 nanometers with the TSMC code name N7 +, similar to the company’s upcoming processors with the architecture Zen 3. N7 + is intended to provide 15-20 percent improvements in transistor density and power consumption in Navi and Zen 2 used the first generation 7-nanometer process N7.
In addition to information on RDNA 2-based “Big Navi”, preliminary information regarding its successor RDNA 3 is also available. The architecture has previously been announced by AMD as a family-based “advanced node“- which is now rumored to be a chiplet design similar to the one Zen 2 uses on the processor side.
As the architecture RDNA 3 will probably not become a reality before the year 2022, these are only early rumors, but being able to bake together graphics processors of mixed parts instead of relying on a more expensive monolithic circuit undeniably sounds like the future on the graphics side as well.