In recent months, there have been rumors about the new generation of RDNA products from AMD, in particular, RDNA 2 and the Navi 21 graphics chip.
AMD Navi 21 will be equipped with a total of 80 computing units (CU)
Rumors from unconfirmed sources have already spread and suggest that the next AMD “Navi 21” chip will have a total of 80 computing units (CU), which will double the CU of the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT.
Magic of RDNA 2 and Native Hardware Raytracing
These rumors come from zhangzhonghao, who published information about the Navi 21 in Chiphell and Machbbs. The source states that Navi 21 will have the RDNA 2 graphics architecture from AMD and will be equipped with hardware-accelerated ray tracing support.
Currently, the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT competes in most cases with the Nvidia RTX 2060 Super and RTX 2070, and we have also observed that the Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti can achieve twice the performance boost as an Nvidia midrange RTX 2060 in GPU-limited scenarios. If the clock rates of the AMD GPU with Navi 21 remain high, the AMD 80 CU graphics card should thus become more powerful than the Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti.
The size of the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT silicon takes up about 251 square millimeters. The recently photographed 7-nm silicon of Microsoft’s Xbox series is about 407 square millimeters in size. This means that a Radeon graphics card with twice as many CUs as the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT is expected to be easily produced. If a console chip can be larger than 401 square millimeters, AMD could produce a 450-500 square millimeter high-end graphics card.
Although Zhangzhonghao’s reports on AMD’s Navi 21 silicon may be inaccurate, there is no doubt that AMD could make a greater Navi graphics card if they wished to do so. AMD’s CEO has even confirmed that a “Big Navi” graphics card is being produced, although it remains to be seen if it is really Navi 21 or not.