We’re just weeks away from the launch of AMD’s RDNA 2 GPUs, but a firmware listing may have prematurely outed the specs for the the company’s highly-anticipated Big Navi cards.
An eagle-eyed Redditor found a listing in the new ROCm (Radeon Open Compute) firmware that reveals some of the specs for the so-called Sienna Cichlid GPU - otherwise known Navi 21 or Big Navi - which will arrive as the flagship of the RX 6000 series
The listing hints that the GPU will feature 80 compute units (CUs) and a 256-bit memory bus. If each Compute Unit (CU) in AMD's RDNA 2 architecture still equates to 64 Stream Processors (SPs), that means Big Navi will 5,120 SPs.
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If this is true, and if the GPU runs on TSMC's latest 7nm process, the flagship RDNA 2 processor could deliver Nvidia RTX 3080 levels of performance. After all, AMD has already promised that RDNA 2 will deliver 50% more performance per watt than its first generation RDNA architecture.
What's more, a recent rumor suggests the GPU will feature 16GB VRAM - more than the 10GB Nvidia has loaded onto its Ampere GPU.
The firmware update also references a graphics card codenamed Navy Flounder, believed to be Navi 22 or Navi 23. This mid-range GPU features 40 CUs and a 192-bit memory bus, according to the listing, which amounts to 2,560 SP.
This card will likely arrive as a replacement for the AMD RX 5700 XT, but with its newer RDNA 2 architecture, it will support real time ray tracing and be capable of gaming in 4K. We don’t have any details about performance just yet, but it could give Nvidia’s RTX 2070 a run for its money.
It won’t be long until we find out for sure, as AMD will announce these new GPUs under the RX 6000 series branding on October 28.
