With AMD’s Big Navi graphics card, Team Red was aiming at the high-end GPU space that had been dominated by NVIDIA’s RTX x80 and x80 Tis for several years. It’d be fair to say that the RX 6800 and 6800 XT are quite competitive at 4K and 1440p, giving both the RTX 3070 and 3080 a run for their money. With the desktop and DIY market taken care of, AMD is now looking to make its mark in the mobile (notebook) graphics segment.
Renoir was a big success and will soon be followed by the Ryzen 5000 APUs, namely Cezanne and Lucienne, featuring the Zen 3 and Zen 2 core architectures, respectively. However, as you might have noticed nearly all the Renoir laptops are limited to NVIDIA’s RTX 1650/1660 Ti and the RTX 2060 GPUs. Only a couple of them leverages the RX 5600M which is a much better option.
The power efficiency of the Big Navi parts means that AMD has a chance to make some decent gains in the mobile graphics market which has been dominated by NVIDIA for nearly a decade now. As per a source, Navi 22’s mobile variant will have a TDP of just 100W, with Navi 21 pegged at around 150W.
Navi 22 will come with a bus width of 160-bit to 192-bit, paired with 10GB and 12GB of graphics memory, respectively, continuing AMD’s “more-memory” campaign in the notebook space.
Navi 21 should come with a 256-bit bus and up to 16GB of memory. The core counts should stay the same, but the boost clocks will be brought down to keep the TDP in check. The Infinity Cache should be retained as well as it’s one of the core performance drivers behind the RDNA 2 design, but there’s a chance that the budget and mid-range parts like Navi 22 won’t adopt it to save die space and keep the BOM in check. The mobile “Big Navi” GPUs should be announced at CES 2021 along with the Cezanne/Lucienne APUs.
