It seems like AMD’s Radeon Navi GPUs might show up at Computex 2019 after all, with a possible release on 7/7/19 to mark team red’s shift to the 7nm manufacturing process. Phonorix has spotted a new open source driver for a GPU codenamed, “gfx1010” which will most likely be the highly anticipated Radeon product.
At the time of writing, the AMDGPU kernel driver changes and Gallium3D support changes (or AMDVLK Vulkan) code has yet to be posted for review. But with GFX10(10) changes now hitting LLVM Git, it looks like the legal review is clearing up that usually is the last step before allowing the code to be published at AMD.
Phonorix
So far there are the target definitions that includes workarounds for different architecture bugs and a few new instructions. There’s also the SGPR register changes for GFX10 though not too revealing.
From what we already know from previous rumors, Navi will be a mid-range part faster than the RX Vega 56, but slower than the Radeon VII. The GPU is expected to go up against NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2060 and 2070, and perhaps even the higher-end 2080 in certain titles. We did an extensive post on the rumored specs of Navi in which we discussed that some features of Vega such as the Draw Stream Binning Rasterizer and Primitive Shaders will be brought back to allow some sort of hardware-level support for ray tracing and make up for the lack of architectural upgrades.
The price of the Navi is expected to be somewhere north of the $250 mark, and a TDP of 150W, courtesy of the 7nm node should keep the thermals and power-draw in check. Other than that, the top-end Navi GPU is supposed to have 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, paired with a 256-bit bus, resulting in a bandwidth of 410GB/s.
If this indeed is the case, then AMD will have a formidable new product in the upper-mid range graphics card market, and as a result, NVIDIA’s RTX cards will either have to get cheaper or team green will come up with a new non-RTX Turing card to keep up with Navi.
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