What I found strange is it has the same amount of shaders and 32 more rops as the 6900xt, but over double the transistors?!?!?
Not quite, this is what the XTX has: MCD Transistors 2,050 million x6.
As the 7900 GRE only has 4 (2 of 6 are dummy dies) of those for 256 bit bus combined, you can subtract 4,1B transistors coming around 53.5B in total.
As of why the transistor count increased that much:
- new architecture with many new features, for example dual issue (2x amount of actions in theory for every shader, in effect more like 30% more performance max)
- RT improved
- AI cores
As a part of the chip is deactivated, the 57,7B is for the WHOLE chip + ALL 6x MCDs, the usable transistor amount is far less than the 53.5B i already mentioned, but reviewers don't use cut down transistor sizes. What can be used is if 2 chiplets are simply not there in a MCM design, those can easily be subtracted and should be, by the reviewers. So we have 53.5B minus transistors that are not activated/not usable. This shrinks the difference to the 6900 XT considerably. The 7800 XT which doesn't have that many transistors is barely slower than this.
