Leaks suggest AMD's new GPU has 3x the core count of an RX 6900 XT | PC Gamer - gideongallembey

Leaks suggest AMD's newfangled GPU has 3x the gist count of an RX 6900 XT

AMD Navi silicon stripped bare by Fritzchens Fritz

(Visualise credit: Fritzchens Fritz, Flickr)

AMD's RDNA 3-powered Navi 31 GPU is suggested to be some kinda 15,360 essence beast. That's at least what the Twitter leakers are seemingly unified in pointing out for the succeeding-gen Radeon gaming card.

Forget the fact the AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, and its little sibling are expected to launch soon, the rumour mill is grinding away happening something a lot bigger, and potentially a lot more significant in the AMD vs Nvidia GPU state of war.

The graphics card makers are going to struggle to get anything suchlike that five-figure core reckon into a single chip, and pull round workable long-terminal figure, then a multi-chip mental faculty (MCM), surgery chiplet design is being suggested as the best way to push GPUs gardant.

That is what's beingness proposed for the new Radeon computer architecture, featuring the third generation of Navi GPUs, and hoped-for to land around the tail-end of next year.

We've already looked into the specifics about why AMD would want to create a chiplet GPU, and the feasibility of such an endeavour, but if the rumours really are coalescing into a seamless form then the designs for the virgin graphics chips have been finalised.

In a nutshell, we're hitting the reticle limits of the sized of unmarried chips today's manufacturing equipment is able to create. At the consequence that sits at 858mm2, with AMD's biggest, the figure out-convergent GPU at the heart of its Instinct MI100 card reportedly measure in at around 709mm2.

Thus chiplets are the best way to increase core counts, without making them unwieldy and implausibly dearly-won.

The latest rumours collated past 3DCenter (via Videocardz), featuring one of its own forum members admittedly, appear to correspond with suggestions earlier this month from a Twitter leaker, Kopite7kimi, about a figure of 15,360 for the Navi 31 GPU's sum weigh. We should probably in real time point outgoing that in this context, we're referring to 'cores' as stream processors operating theatre 32-bit vagrant-point units, because that's the bulk of work that a GPU does in-game.

3DCenter Forum post about Navi 31 rumours — (Image credit: 3DCenter)

But that 15,360 bod is still rather stupefying, because if you compare that with the biggest AMD RDNA chip, the Navi 21, you're talk about an MCM GPU with threefold the core count of a Radeon RX 6900 XT.

The total count comes from an apparent doubling of the number of stream processors inside an RDNA 3 workgroup. This 'workgroup' is the name for the dual-compute unit structure introduced with the first RDNA, and in that respect is a suggestion that AMD testament eliminate all mentions of compute units (CUs) from this genesis.

There will reportedly be 30 workgroups per GPU chiplet, with each of those containing 7,680 cores (30x256), and the Navi 31 die will take two of those graphics chiplets for a rolled into one total of 15,360 cores.

Therein lies the potential of a multi-crisp graphics processor; like its Ryzen CPU cousins, it gives you the selection to seamlessly connect discrete chiplets together to deliver more cores than you could conceivably fit into a monolithic die. And for a heap less cash in too.

But it needs a lot more cache.

The make noise is that the Navi 31 GPU bequeath inactive remain strapped to a 256-bit memory double-decker—look-alike its Navi 21 forebears—but will boast a much big Infinity Cache (IC) factor. In that location is close to speculation that could exist either 256MB or 512MB, which is either twice or foursome multiplication the size of the Infinity Squirrel away pledged to the Navi 21 GPU.

Unlike with second-gen Navi, however, the rumours are that the IC won't be buried inside the actual GPU, with a per-chiplet allocation, but will seminal fluid As separate 'blobs' of stinky-performance cache retention attached to the chiplets themselves. That's likely going to be enabled in a correspondent way to the 3D V-Hoard AMD is using for upcoming Ryzen CPUs.

AMD 3D chiplets — (Mental image credit: AMD)

Information technology's potentially this Eternity Cache silicon that could be the magic trick sauce for AMD's RDNA 3 chiplet GPUs, and that could represent what enables the whole package to be seen simply as one man-to-man art chip by whatever software package is making demands of information technology.

That's the Blessed grail for multi-GPU arrays, and would mean an end to any potential CrossFire (surgery in Nvidia's case, SLI) shenanigans.

With CrossFire and SLI, despite mating GPUs together you ne'er puzzle out a linear two-times performance boost as there are a lot of logistical overheads when splitting the creation of gaming frames across two discrete GPUs. Simply with an effectively imperceptible multi-chip intent you are far more likely to see a 15,360 substance Navi 31 card offering nearer to three multiplication the bare-assed power of an RX 6900 XT.

How effective this ends functioning existence we'll only know for sure one time we get our custody on one in the labs ourselves. But there are very much of parallels to be drawn between what AMD did with Ryzen against Intel, and what Navi 31 could do for the AMD vs. Nvidia combat, and that's potentially same exciting for the future of PC graphics cards.

Dave has been play since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug connected the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year advanced. When he dropped IT unfashionable of the window. Atomic number 2 first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many another decades ago, then affected onto PC Format full-time, then Personal computer Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he's back up, writing about the nightmarish graphics menu market, CPUs with more cores than sense, play laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.