Radeon RX 7950 XTX And More Unreleased GPUs Break Cover In AMD's Open-Source Platform
by
Zak Killian
—
Thursday, May 04, 2023, 02:47 PM EDT
AMD's RDNA 3 architecture is a significant evolution over the RDNA 2 used in its Radeon RX 6000 GPUs. Unfortunately, it's only available in two places right now: the halo-tier Radeon RX 7900 products, and the integrated graphics of Ryzen 7040-series processors.
That's all set to change this quarter, according to comments by CEO Dr. Lisa Su on a financial call this past Tuesday. She stated that AMD will launch "new mainstream Radeon 7000 series GPUs this quarter." Which GPUs, though? Well, now we have an idea thanks to a leak by AMD itself.
Lisa Su's comments from Tuesday's financial call. Transcript: SeekingAlpha
As part of a pull request in its ROCm open-source compute platform, AMD updated a text file that lists all of the graphics processors supported by ROCm. That update included the Radeon RX 7900 XT and XTX as well as the previously-announced Radeon RX 7600 and 7700 mobile GPUs. All well and good, but it also included entries for Radeon RX 7950 XT and XTX cards, as well as the Radeon RX 7800, RX 7700, RX 7600, and RX 7500, all with XT appellations.
The list has since been removed from the pull request, and that's understandable considering AMD hasn't confirmed the existence of any of these products. Besides the names, the list also marked down which GPU each graphics card would use.
Out of the list, only one card—the Radeon RX 7800 XT—is slated to use the Navi 32 graphics processor. The RX 7950 and RX 7950 XTX are based on Navi 31, of course. Meanwhile, the rest of the new GPUs from the RX 7700 XT down to the RX 7500 XT, are apparently based on the same Navi 33 GPU that also powers the mobile Radeon RX 7700 and 7600 series.
So what are these cards? Well, the Radeon RX 7950 XT and RX 7950 XTX are likely going to be Navi 31 silicon pushed to the extreme limits of power and frequency. That's exactly what we saw with the Radeon RX 6950 XT, which took the Navi 21 GPU to its ultimate conclusion, drawing north of 300 watts. The Radeon RX 7900 XTX is already quite a power-thirsty GPU, but AMD might bump the memory clock or make other changes.
As for the mainstream and lower-end cards, we don't expect to see the Radeon RX 7800 XT any time soon because earlier rumors indicated that the Navi 32 GPU would come after the Navi 31 and Navi 33 parts. For its part, the monolithic Navi 33 seems like it could be too small for an "x700" series GPU, but it's important to remember that RDNA 3 has double the theoretical compute of RDNA 2 at the same number of compute units.
Whatever the case, we're extremely curious to see these cards and what they're capable of. AMD is expected to announce something from this list at or before Computex, which begins on May 30th in Taipei.
