AMD RDNA 3 will soon be upon us now that it has been over a year since AMD introduced its RDNA 2 graphics architecture design, or Big Navi, with the Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards. 6000 is about to arrive, of according to the typical AMD product cadence, but the times have been anything but typical.
RDNA is the architecture and instruction set for AMD's graphics processor. It includes everything from compute and cache design to shaders and visual pipeline. AMD RDNA 3 will continue to build on the company's strong performance with its recent graphics cards.
While many AMD RDNA 3 details have been kept under wraps, there are more than a few leaks to hint at what's to come for the next generation of graphics cards.
AMD RDNA 3: get straight to the point
- What is it? AMD's next generation GPU architectures are the continuation of the Radeon RX 6000 series.
- When did it come out? Since the end of 2022
- How much will it cost? From €400 to €2,000+
AMD RDNA 3 Release Date
There is no confirmed date for the release of AMD RDNA 3 graphics cards, but there is good reason to believe that the first models will be released by the end of this year.
During AMD's Q2021 2022 earnings call in late July 2022, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su said, "We remain on track to launch next-generation products in 4, including our Zen 5 processors built with the industry-leading 3-nanometer process." technology and our RDNA XNUMX GPUs,” reported Seeking Alpha.
However, there may be reason to worry if AMD is still on this timeline. The company's subsequent earnings call omitted any mention of RDNA 3 GPUs. Beyond that, AMD's CES 2022 keynote also didn't touch on upcoming graphics cards. This could mean that the release schedule is being pushed back, or it could be that AMD is planning an upgrade to its current RDNA 2 graphics cards, as has been said, and talk of RDNA 3 would take the wind out of those updated cards' sails. just when AMD needs them to compete with Nvidia's new RTX 3080 Ti.
With three different RDNA 3-based graphics cards expected in the initial lineup, it's also possible that we'll only see a portion of them a year from now, as both AMD and Nvidia have been slow to release low-end models. after the introduction of flagship GPUs in its new series.
AMD RDNA 3 Price
We have little basis for guessing the price of AMD's RDNA 3 graphics card. Logically, the new GPUs, Navi 31, 32 and 33, will be the successors to the Navi 21 found in the €6900 Radeon RX 999 XT and the €6800 RX 649 XT, Navi 22 found in the RX 6700 €479 XT and Navi 23 found in the RX. 6600 XT at €379, respectively.
Given the supply chain and logistics issues of the last two years that are still causing problems, as well as potential price increases from TSMC for chip manufacturing, we're sure to see Radeon RX 7000 Series graphics cards that are more expensive. than its predecessors.
With that in mind, RedGamingTech suggested that the top-end model could be configured to be a real beast and could cost upwards of €2,000.
AMD RDNA 3 Specifications and Performance
There's little more than whispers and rumors when it comes to RDNA 3-based graphics card specs, but the ones we've heard suggest powerful chips that will borrow a key page from AMD's Ryzen processor playbook. .
One of the first things to understand about RDNA 3 is that it will deviate even further from how some of the components are understood with previous architectures. With RDNA 2, the chip contained a number of shader engines, which in turn contained a large number of dual compute units loaded with stream processors, texture units, and ray accelerator units.
For RDNA 3, the notion of a computational unit appears to have been superseded by workgroup processors which themselves contain stream processors and other elements, and the new models can simply be populated. This may be in part because AMD is using a smaller 5nm manufacturing process to fit more into a smaller space and because it's going to use a multi-chip module design, putting multiple GPU chips on one chip instead of monolithic single chip, just like him. did on Ryzen processors. While much of this is still rumor and speculation, consider the rest even less certain until AMD makes an official announcement.
Putting the new design into perspective, the Navi 31 is supposed to have two chipsets, each with 30 workgroups, each containing 256 cores (or stream processors). That's 7,680 cores per chip and a total of 15,360 cores for the entire Navi 31 chip, which is triple the number of stream processors found in the RX 6900 XT.
The usual hardware leaker @Greymon55 on Twitter suggests that the Navi 31 chip plugs in up to 16GB of GDDR6 memory on a 256-bit bus and includes 256MB (or 512MB, according to RedGamingTech sources) of 3D Infinity Cache, which increases significantly the performance to compensate using GDDR6X and operating up to 2.5GHz.
Navi 32 would in turn have 40 workgroup processors, 12 GB of GDDR6 on a 192-bit bus, 192 MB of 3D Infinity cache, and would run between 2,6 and 2,8 GHz.
Navi 33 boils down to 16 workgroup CPUs, 8 GB of GDDR6 on a 128-bit bus, 64 MB of Infinity cache, and clocks between 2,8 and 3,0 GHz.
To put that into perspective, the Navi 31 would have the aforementioned 15,360 stream processors, the Navi 32 would top out at 10,240, and the Navi 31 would have 4,096 (within a Radeon 6900 XT number-punching distance).
Although teraflops don't tell us everything about a GPU's performance, it can be a pretty useful metric for comparison. And considering the number of cores and clock speeds, we expect Navi 31 to max out at 76,8 TFLOPS of FP32 performance, Navi 32 to max out at 57,3 TFLOPS, and Navi 33 to max out at 24,6, XNUMX TFLOPS.
How does this compare to the latest and greatest cards currently on the market? The Radeon RX 6900 XT offers 23,04 TFLOPS of FP32 performance and the RTX 3090 offers 35,7 TFLOPS. In other words, RDNA 3 chips could cause a serious problem even in Nvidia's best, unless the RTX 4090 is as fast as expected.
We expect the new chips to offer a huge improvement in efficiency. Switching to a small manufacturing process will help with this. And AMD Executive Vice President Rick Bergman said even before RDNA 2 was released that RDNA 3 would offer a similar jump in performance per watt, which should mean they would be 50% more efficient than RDNA. You won't be power hungry anymore, however, as RedGamingTech suggests that Navi 31 cards should consume around 375W of power, but could go as high as 450W.
We will have to wait and see to what extent that turns out to be true.