We’ve been hearing a lot about AMD’s upcoming Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics card. This GPU will be based on the Navi 10 die and compete with the GeForce RTX 2060 and the GTX 1660 Ti. However, it seems like that’s not the only thing the Radeon team has got in the works. According to a report from a Taiwanese site, PPT, AMD is also working on a high-end Navi 21 graphics card set for launch in the latter half of 2020.
7nm+ Navi 21 AKA RTX 2080 Ti Killer with Ray-Tracing in 2020?
Over the past year (ever since the Navi 10 based RX 5700 series launched), we have been hearing chatter of a much faster, ray-tracing supported Navi 20 GPU. This rumored Radeon flagship will be based on the newer RDNA 2 design and will finally ditch the last vestiges of the GCN architecture. It is also supposed to be AMD’s first ultra-high-end GPU since the RX Fury X. Meaning, it will compete with the mightly RTX 2080 Ti that NVIDIA’s presently selling for well over $1,000. A preposterous price to be sure.
That’s what happens when there’s a lack of competition. Moving on, we only know the basic details of this Navi 21 GPU. It’s assumed that Navi 20 was either scrapped or renamed to Navi 21. According to sources, this GPU has been finally taped. That means the GPU die design has been finalized and sent for volume production.
Navi 21 will leverage TSMC’s 7nm+ node and is said to have a massive die size of 505mm2. In comparison, the RX 5700 XT (Navi 10) has a puny 251mm2 die. Even the older Navi 20 powering the Radeon VII was just 331mm2 in size.
This means we’re looking at a GPU that might be twice as fast as the RX 5700 XT (if AMD enables the entire chip). The new Navi design means that we might get a high-end part with more than 64 Compute Units or 4096 shaders. That would put it directly in competition with the RTX 2080 Ti. While I don’t expect it to be faster than the Ti, it will most likely offer similar performance for much less. That is the tried and tested AMD MO.
We’ll let you know as we hear more.
