AMD Radeon RX 7nm Navi GPU Benchmarks Allegedly Leaked, 20 CUs And 1280 SPs
What an interesting year it is turning out to be for graphics. We have Intel doubling down on its ambitious plans to rock the discrete GPU market with invitations to join company on its "Odyssey," NVIDIA is pushing both RTX-enabled and non-RTX variants of Turing, and AMD is headed towards releasing a new GPU architecture called Navi. As it pertains to the latter, some more leaked benchmarks are making the rounds.
Navi, as you might be aware if you follow developments in tech and company roadmaps, is AMD's successor to Vega. It is being built on a 7-nanometer manufacturing process, as is the recently launched Radeon VII, though that card is essentially a refresh of Vega. We know Navi is real and that is it coming out sometime this year. What we don't know for certain is how it will perform.
A user on Reddit noticed a new entry on CompuBench that might give us a clue as to what to expect from Navi. The entry is labeled "AMD 66AF:F1," which presumably indicates Navi, otherwise it would likely list a more recognizable name.
Assuming the information is accurate (and that's not always a given with leaked entries), this version of Navi has 20 Compute Units (CUs), which works out to 128 Stream Processors (SPs). It is not a performance part, and instead aligns with previous rumors that Navi would be a mid-range GPU (albeit in the upper end). In this instance, that looks to be true.
The benchmarks are kind of all over the place, but there's a look at how the leaked Navi scores compare with a Radeon RX 580 in graphics...
Navi comes out way ahead, which bodes well for gaming performance. In compute performance, however, the gains are not as strong. Here is how the leaked benchmarks compare with a Radeon RX Vega in compute workloads...
There are a bunch more benchmarks available, but we don't want to dive too deeply into them because (A) CompuBench's comparison tool is clunky, and (B) there are some fluctuations in scores that simply do not make sense.
That said, the general takeaway is that based on this leak, Navi is shaping up to be a decent mid-range upgrade for gamers, while perhaps not offering a big leap in compute performance. As always, though, we will have to wait and see how it shakes out.
