In an interview with Tomshardware, AMD's Senior Vice President, Sam Naffziger, has hinted that the next-gen RDNA 3 GPUs powering the Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards will feature higher power consumption than existing solutions while still delivering 50% perf/watt gains.
AMD Radeon RX 7000 Graphics Cards With RDNA 3 GPUs To Be More Power Hungry Than RDNA 2-Powered Radeon RX 6000 Series
Both AMD and NVIDIA are expected to heavily focus on efficiency and GPU power design of their next-gen GPUs to deliver higher performance. We have seen various leaks for NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards which are expected to rock up to 600W designs. Meanwhile, AMD is saying that while they announced a more than 50% performance per watt uplift over the previous generation, that doesn't mean that power levels aren't going to go up for RDNA 3 'Radeon RX 7000' series graphics cards.
“It's really the fundamentals of physics that are driving this,” Naffziger explained. "The demand for gaming and compute performance is, if anything, just accelerating, and at the same time, the underlying process technology is slowing down pretty dramatically — and the improvement rate. So the power levels are just going to keep going up. Now, we've got a multi-year roadmap of very significant efficiency improvements to offset that curve, but the trend is there.”
"Performance is king," stated Naffziger, "but even if our designs are more power-efficient, that doesn't mean you don't push power levels up if the competition is doing the same thing. It's just that they'll have to push them a lot higher than we will."
- Sam Naggziger (AMD's SVP & Product Technology Architect) via Tomshardware
If you remember, a few months back, we had seen rumors of the AMD RDNA 3-powered Radeon RX 7000 series offering TDPs of up to 400W. That's a 100W increase over the existing Navi 21 GPU that goes up to 335W (Navi 21 KXTX). So if AMD is to achieve a 2x performance gain over its existing chip lineup, the TDP should end up close to 450W which is the same as the one rumored for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 BFGPU. At the same time, the peak power and operational power may vary a lot and Sam is pretty confident when he says that the competition will have to push the power higher (a lot higher) than they will.
Furthermore, next-gen graphics cards with over 400-450W TBP will have to utilize the brand new PCIe Gen 5 connectors considering triple 8-pin connectors can only go as far as up to 450W & no company has made that design choice for their reference cards at least (yet). So whether AMD is looking to go the triple 8-pin route or gonna end up with the new PCIe Gen 5 connector that will conform to the ATX 3.0 standard and deliver stable performance, remains to be seen from the AMD camp.
Some of the key features of the RDNA 3 GPUs highlighted by AMD will include:
- 5nm Process Node
- Advanced Chiplet Packaging
- Rearchitected Compute Unit
- Optimized Graphics Pipeline
- Next-Gen AMD Infinity Cache
- >50% Perf/Watt vs RDNA 2
The AMD Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards based on the RDNA 3 GPU architecture are expected to launch later this year so expect more information in the coming months.
AMD RDNA 3 Navi 3X GPU Configurations (Preliminary)
| GPU Name | Navi 21 | Navi 33 | Navi 32 | Navi 31 | Navi 3X |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Codename | Sienna Cichlid | Hotpink Bonefish | Wheat Nas | Plum Bonito | TBD |
| GPU Process | 7nm | 6nm | 5nm/6nm | 5nm/6nm | 5nm/6nm |
| GPU Package | Monolithic | Monolithic | MCM (1 GCD + 4 MCD) | MCM (1 GCD + 6 MCD) | MCM (TBD) |
| GPU Die Size | 520mm2 | 203mm2 (Only GCD) | 200mm2 (Only GCD) 425mm2 (with MCDs) | 300mm2 (Only GCD) 522mm2 (with MCDs) | TBD |
| Shader Engines | 4 | 2 | 3 | 6 | 8 |
| GPU WGPs | 40 | 16 | 30 | 48 | 64 |
| SPs Per WGP | 128 | 128 | 128 | 128 | 128 |
| Compute Units (Per Die) | 80 | 32 | 60 | 96 | 128 (per GPU) 256 (Total) |
| SPs (Per Die) | 5120 | 2048 | 3840 | 6144 | 4096 |
| ALUs (Per Die) | 5120 | 4096 | 7680 | 12288 | 16384 |
| Memory Bus | 256-bit | 128-bit | 256-bit | 384-bit | 384-bit x2? |
| Memory Type | GDDR6 | GDDR6 | GDDR6 | GDDR6 | GDDR6 |
| Memory Capacity | Up To 16 GB | Up To 8 GB | Up To 16 GB | Up To 24 GB | Up To 32 GB |
| Memory Speed | 16-18 Gbps | TBD | TBD | 20 Gbps | TBD |
| Memory Bandwidth | 512-576 GB/s | TBD | TBD | 960 GB/s | TBD |
| Infinity Cache | 128 MB | 32 MB | 64 MB | 96/192 MB | TBD |
| Flagship SKU | Radeon RX 6900 XTX | Radeon RX 7600 XT? Radeon RX 7700M? | Radeon RX 7800 XT? Radeon RX 7900M? | Radeon RX 7900 XTX | Radeon Pro |
| TBP (Max) | 330W | ~150W | ~250W | 335W | TBD |
| Launch | Q4 2020 | Q4 2022? | Q4 2022? | Q4 2022? | 2023? |
News Source: Videocardz
