It has lengthy been speculated that AMD has determined to cancel the event of a follow-up to the RX 7900 XTX, and as an alternative put all its efforts into mid-range and decrease playing cards. Nonetheless, we’re feeling a renewed sense of disappointment at the dimensions of what we’ve reportedly missed, if this AMD Radeon RX 8900 XTX leak is to be believed.
Whereas AMD graphics playing cards proceed to battle to make inroads within the race for PC avid gamers’ money, with the newest setback being MSI dropping AMD graphics playing cards from its roster, it’s comprehensible why the corporate has determined to not combat for the highest spot on the perfect graphics card lists of the world. Nonetheless, based mostly on these specs, its subsequent gen flagship might have been a world beater.
The leak comes by way of the boards of tech web site, Anandtech, with a consumer posting a list of the specs of a potential future Navi 4 GPU designated Navi 4C. Navi is the long-running codename for AMD’s GPUs, with the RX 7900 XTX utilizing the Navi 31 moniker.
The important thing element on this leak is that it reveals this Navi 4C GPU variant having 9 shader engines, which tallies with earlier rumors. This in flip would infer that the GPU was set to make use of 9 compute chiplets.
What does that imply? Effectively, for some RDNA 3 GPUs like Navi 31, AMD separated out the GPU package deal into a number of totally different dies or chips. These chiplets consisted of a giant graphics compute die (GCD), which housed all of the processing bits, and 6 small MCDs, which comprise the reminiscence interface and L3 cache chips. For RDNA 4, although, AMD was reportedly seeking to break the GPU down additional, with a number of chiplets used to kind the GCD.
By itself, the actual fact there would have been 9 of those chiplets doesn’t imply an enormous quantity, as a result of we don’t understand how huge they’d have been nor what number of options could be in each. Nonetheless, it nonetheless speaks to this chip being fairly a formidable feat of engineering.
What’s extra, additional dialogue on the discussion board does give us a clue as to only how giant and highly effective this chip might need been. One other consumer suggests the variety of compute models for the Navi 4C would have been “above 200” by “a good bit”. As compared, the RX 7900 XTX’s Navi 31 GPU has simply 96 compute models, so we might have been a GPU with twice the ability of that card, with probably 12,800 stream processors.
Sadly, although, we’re not anticipating to see such a GPU or card ever seem, because it’s rumored that AMD hasn’t been in a position to make its new chiplet expertise scale to this degree. As an alternative, we’re anticipating to see solely smaller variants of the RDNA 4 GPU structure, that are set to compete at decrease tiers of efficiency.
Nonetheless, it’s good to consider what might have been and what should be, if AMD someway manages to get Navi 4C working. Within the meantime, although, we are able to advocate giving the RDNA 3 deep dive on Customized PC a learn to prime you for what AMD is likely to be cooking up subsequent. Or try our RX 7900 XTX assessment for our ideas on AMD’s present flagship.
