Wednesday, September 9th 2020
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Alleged AMD Radeon "Big Navi" Prototype Pictured
Following Wednesday's announcement of the Radeon RX 6000 series with product launches on October 28, the rumor mill started rolling full steam ahead. The RX 6000 series GPUs by AMD will be based on the RDNA2 graphics architecture, the same exact architecture powering the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, and will feature DirectX 12 Ultimate support, including hardware raytracing. A PC enthusiast on Chinese microblogging site Bilibili posted a picture of an alleged "Big Navi" prototype. Since its July 2019 debut, there have been rumors of AMD working on a new high-end GPU to take on the upper-segment of NVIDIA, given that the RX 5700 series offered competitive performance to NVIDIA's breadwinning products, such as the RTX 2070 series and RTX 2060 series.
The picture reveals the reverse side of the alleged "Big Navi" prototype's PCB, showing a larger cluster of GPU ancillaries than those behind a "Navi 10," and eight memory pads with the paper labels "Typical XT ASIC" references for a "16 Gb Samsung GDDR6 memory." Over a 256-bit wide memory interface, the chip should hence have 16 GB of GDDR6 memory. Since this is a prototype, several headers are sticking out of the PCB for the design and prototyping of the product. A tower-type CPU cooler has been MacGyvered onto the GPU (which isn't uncommon for VGA prototypes). We'll hear a lot more about this product in the run up to its October 28 launch.
Sources:
搞机猛男 (bilibili), ChipHell Forums
The picture reveals the reverse side of the alleged "Big Navi" prototype's PCB, showing a larger cluster of GPU ancillaries than those behind a "Navi 10," and eight memory pads with the paper labels "Typical XT ASIC" references for a "16 Gb Samsung GDDR6 memory." Over a 256-bit wide memory interface, the chip should hence have 16 GB of GDDR6 memory. Since this is a prototype, several headers are sticking out of the PCB for the design and prototyping of the product. A tower-type CPU cooler has been MacGyvered onto the GPU (which isn't uncommon for VGA prototypes). We'll hear a lot more about this product in the run up to its October 28 launch.
98 Comments on Alleged AMD Radeon "Big Navi" Prototype Pictured
2. We don't know whether data compression will be applied, and how significant it will be.
3. We may not know all the other nooks and crannies AMD engineers choose to implement, that we fail to come up with on the spot.
HBM2, sure. 2e ... highly unlikely.
But I doubt AMD are using 2e. I suspect they're waiting for RDNA3 to do a full stack HBM product line. Doesn't particularly look like it from new XB's info ... in the past, yes.
8 x 16Gbit = 16GB
Rumor is that Frontier is Arcturus, but whatever they use for the Frontier Supercomputer could probably be the base for a very high-end gaming card. AMD is splitting the marketing between "CDNA" (Compute Cards) and RDNA (Radeon / Gaming cards), but some R&D effort would cross over between the two.
That said I don't see AMD competing with RTX 3090, I think they are going to have a card that is a bit slower than the RTX 3080, probably about 15% slower, but costs $100 less, and then have a RTX 3070 competitor that is about 10% faster at $500.
So a RX 6900 at $600 with 15% less performance than RTX 3080
RX 6800 at $500 with 10% more performance than RTX 3070
RX 6700 at $400 that is about 20% faster than RX 5700XT
RX 6600 at $300 at about 20% faster than RX 5700
RX 5700xt is likely to be discontinued
RX 5700 likely to be sold at $250 price
RX 5600xt at $200
RX 5600 at $170
RX 5500xt at $140
can it beat ASUS ROG GeForce GTX 2080 Ti Matrix Platinum gpu?
Or Big Navi simply isn't as big as we thought... Same thing.
If it ain't pulling, it ain't collecting.
While I want Big Navi to equal 3080 performance I think its will come in +15% faster than the 3070 and with 16GB's of ram. And that is why rumored launch price of $599 was lowered to $549 when they saw the performance of the 3080.
If it comes out and beat expectations I'll be happy either way as I'm due for a gpu upgrade, after building this rig in dec 2019 and carrying over my current gpu.