AMD RDNA Three will quickly be upon us now that it’s been over a yr since AMD launched its RDNA 2, or Massive Navi, graphics structure design with the Radeon RX 6000 sequence graphics playing cards. The 6000-series successor is sort of due, going by AMD’s typical product cadence, however instances have been something however typical.

RDNA is the structure and instruction set of AMD’s graphics processors. It contains the whole lot from the design of the compute items and cache to the shaders and visible pipeline. AMD RDNA Three will proceed to construct upon the sturdy showings the corporate has made with its latest graphics playing cards. 

Although a variety of particulars about AMD RDNA Three has been stored below wraps, there are quite a lot of leaks to trace at what’s to come back for the following era of graphics playing cards.

 AMD RDNA 3: lower to the chase 

• What’s it? AMD’s next-gen GPU architectures following up the Radeon RX 6000 Collection.
• When is it out? As quickly as the tip of 2022
• What’s going to it price? Wherever from $400 to $2,000+

 AMD RDNA Three launch date 

There’s no confirmed date for the discharge of AMD RDNA Three graphics playing cards, however there’s good motive to consider the primary few fashions will come out on the finish of this yr. 

Throughout AMD’s Q2 2021 earnings name on the finish of July, 2022, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su, mentioned,  “We stay on monitor to launch subsequent era merchandise in 2022, together with our Zen Four processors constructed with industry-leading 5-nanometer course of expertise and our RDNA Three GPUs,” Searching for Alpha reported.

Nonetheless, there could also be some grounds to fret about whether or not AMD continues to be on that timeline. The corporate’s subsequent earnings name not noted any point out of RDNA Three GPUs. Past that, AMD’s CES 2022 keynote additionally failed to the touch on upcoming graphics playing cards. This might imply the launch schedule is slipping, or it might be that AMD is planning a refresh of its present RDNA 2 graphics playing cards, as has been rumored, and speaking about RDNA Three would suck the wind out of the sails of these refreshed playing cards proper when AMD wants them to compete with Nvidia’s new RTX 3080 Ti.

As three separate graphics playing cards constructed on RDNA Three are anticipated within the preliminary line-up, it’s additionally attainable we’ll solely see a portion of them inside the yr, as AMD and Nvidia each have been sluggish to roll out the lower-end fashions after the introduction of the flagship GPUs of their new sequence.

 AMD RDNA Three value 

We now have little foundation for guessing on the costs of AMD’s RDNA Three graphics card. Logically, the brand new GPUs — Navi 31, 32, and 33 — would be the successors to the Navi 21 discovered within the $999 Radeon RX 6900 XT and $649 RX 6800 XT, Navi 22 discovered within the $479 RX 6700 XT, and Navi 23 discovered within the $379 RX 6600 XT, respectively. 

Given provide chain and logistics points over the previous two years which are nonetheless inflicting issues, in addition to TSMC’s attainable value hikes for chip fabrication, we’re certain that we’ll be seeing Radeon RX 7000 Collection graphics playing cards which are dearer than their predecessors. 

With that in thoughts, RedGamingTech has prompt the top-end mannequin could also be set as much as be a real beast and will price over $2,000. 

 AMD RDNA Three specs and efficiency

There’s little extra to go on than whispers and rumors in terms of the specs of RDNA 3-based graphics playing cards, however people who we’ve heard recommend some highly effective chips which are going to be borrowing a key web page out of AMD’s Ryzen CPU playbook.

One of many first issues to know about RDNA Three is that it’s going to make one other shift away from how a few of the parts are understood with earlier architectures. With RDNA 2, the chip contained a variety of shader engines, which in flip contained a bunch of twin compute items loaded with stream processors, texture items, and ray accelerator items. 

For RDNA 3, the notion of a compute unit appears to have been changed with workgroup processors which in flip comprise stream processors and different components, and the brand new fashions could also be merely stuffed. That could be partially as a result of AMD goes with a smaller 5nm manufacturing course of to suit extra right into a tighter house and since it’s going to make use of a multi-chip module design — placing a number of GPU chiplets onto a chip as an alternative of 1 monolithic chip — identical to it has achieved on Ryzen processors. Whereas that is nonetheless largely rumor and hypothesis, take the remainder of this as even much less sure till AMD makes an official announcement. 

Placing the brand new design into perspective, Navi 31 is believed to have two chiplets every with 30 workgroups, which comprise 256 cores (or stream processors) every. That makes for 7,680 cores per chiplet and a complete of 15,360 cores for the entire Navi 31 chip — triple the variety of stream processors discovered on the RX 6900 XT.

Common {hardware} leaker @Greymon55 on Twitter means that the Navi 31 chip hook up with 16GB of GDDR6 reminiscence on a 256-bit bus and embody 256MB (or 512MB, in keeping with sources for RedGamingTech) of 3D Infinity Cache, boosting efficiency significantly to make up for not utilizing GDDR6X, and run at as much as 2.5GHz. 

Navi 32 would in flip have 40 workgroup processors, 12GB of GDDR6 on a 192-bit bus, have 192MB of 3D Infinity Cache, and run between 2.6 and a couple of.8GHz. 

Navi 33 drops right down to 16 workgroup processors, 8GB of GDDR6 on a 128-bit bus, 64MB of Infinity Cache, and clocks between 2.eight and three.0GHz. 

To place this in some extra perspective, Navi 31 would have the beforehand talked about 15,360 stream processors, Navi 32 would hit 10,240, and Navi 31 would boast 4,096 (inside hanging distance of the quantity within the Radeon 6900 XT). 

Whereas teraflops don’t inform us the whole lot a few GPU’s efficiency, it may be a considerably helpful metric for comparability. And taking the core counts and clock speeds, we’d expect Navi 31 to hit a peak 76.eight TFLOPS of FP32 efficiency, Navi 32 to get 57.Three TFLOPS, and Navi 33 to achieve 24.6 TFLOPS. 

How does that get up in opposition to the newest and best playing cards at present in the marketplace? The Radeon RX 6900 XT boasts 23.04 TFLOPS of FP32 efficiency and the RTX 3090 presents 35.7 TFLOPS. In different phrases, RDNA Three chips could possibly be bringing some severe warmth to even Nvidia’s finest, until the RTX 4090 is as quick as rumored.

We do anticipate the brand new chips to supply a giant increase in effectivity. Switching to a small manufacturing course of will play a component in that. And AMD’s Government Vice President, Rick Bergman, even earlier than the launch of RDNA 2, mentioned that RDNA Three would supply an identical leap in performance-per-watt, which ought to imply they’ll be 50% extra environment friendly than RDNA 2. That doesn’t imply they gained’t nonetheless be energy hungry, although, as RedGamingTech suggests Navi 31 playing cards ought to devour about 375W of energy however might go as excessive as 450W. 

We’ll have to attend and see how a lot of this seems to be true.

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