AMD Radeon RX Navi GPU Spotted Online, To Sport GDDR6 Memory and 256-Bit Bus

AMD has been really tight-lipped about its upcoming Radeon RX Navi GPUs. We don’t know anything other than the fact, that they’ll release sometime in the latter half of 2019. There have been no credible leaks and none of the specifications have been confirmed as of now. That might just have changed as the PCB design of possibly the Navi GPU has been spotted online. The purported board includes support for GDDR6 memory with a bus width of 256-bits. This means we’ll either get 8GB cards, or 16GB ones, or perhaps both.

This image comes from Baidu and sports BGAs for 8 VRAM packages. The package size appears to be 180 which means that they’ll hold GDDR6 memory chips. Till now, AMD has been using HBM2 for its high-end GPUs and GDDR5 for mid-range, so this will be the first graphics card from team red to utilize the new memory standard. Since there is space for 8 VRAM chips, that points to the fact that it’ll have a 256-bit bus. In case you didn’t know GDDR5/6 memory is paired with 32-bit controllers, so eight of them (8X32=256) means a total width of 256 bits. In contrast, CPUs are equipped with 64-bit memory controllers, resulting in a 128-bit bus for dual channel and 256 for a quad channel config. But nevermind that, that’s a subject for another day.

Back to the topic at hand, this supposed Navi GPU has an 8 phase VRM for power delivery that sucks in the juice via two 8-pin PCIe controllers. The board partners will have to decide whether to stick to 6-pin power connectors or 8-pin for better overclocking capacity. Lastly, we can also see the display connectors- two DPs, one HDMI and possibly even a USB Type-C port at the lower left side of the board. Just like NVIDIA is selling its RTX graphics cards with USB Type-C ports for next-gen VR devices, AMD seems to be playing catch-up.

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As I’ve said before, this is again an unconfirmed rumor from a shady Chinese website. So take it with your regular grain of salt. If this is your first visit, then let me go through what we already know. As per rumors, AMD’s Navi GPU will compete with NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2070 or perhaps even the 2080, and will sell for a price of $259 which mind you is less than even the RTX 2060. So, can’t be too sure about it. Furthermore, AMD is speculated to bring back some of the discarded features of the Vega architecture to Navi like Draw Stream Binning Rasterizer, Primitive Shaders, and the NGG pipeline. There are also reports that it might even support ray tracing on a hardware level, not sure how but yeah. If you want to read the whole post, click here.

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