AMD’s flagship Navi 21 has not yet been released and a Navi 31 GPU has been confirmed thanks to the MacOS 11 South Beta code.
AMD Navi 31 is confirmed in MacOS 11 drivers
The Navi 21 from AMD, also known as “Big Navi”, is a long-awaited GPU. It is expected to land before the end of this year and will significantly increase AMD’s performance at the top end. A ” possible ” Navi 31 will be the successor of the Navi 21, and it looks like AMD is already working on it, based on the traces found in Apple’s OS codes.
If the chips in the drivers are detected correctly and are recognized from AMD, the release is usually imminent and well ahead of the development cycle. We’re not quite sure what to do with the fact that Navi 21 hasn’t landed yet and we already see Navi 31 appearing in the drivers. Specifically, these are drivers for AMD’s macOS11 “Big Sur”, which are part of the company’s plan to move to its own ARM-based silicon and away from Intel (and AMD) devices. This implies that Apple is planning to keep the AMD GPUs for its products for the time being, and does not plan to deduct this part of the silicon from its plan.
Navi 31 could be a chip that is under development for Apple’s ARM-based Macs and then come to the PC. Here are the mentions of AMD’s Navi 31, which you can see in the Apple drivers from AMD.
Other Navi GPUs, including Navi 22 and 23, were also seen in the drivers in the form of additional support for PCI IDs (which means that the silicon has already passed the final validation phase and the PCI IDs have been officially assigned). These were:
- 0x73A0 (Navi22)
- 0x73A2 (Navi22)
- 0x73A3 (Navi22)
- 0x73AB (Navi22)
- 0x73AE (Navi22)
- 0x73BF (Navi23)
The investigators also saw that AMD Cezanne was mentioned. This is the next AMD APU with a Zen 3 architecture and an RDNA2 Navi GPU.
The speculations that Navi 31 is involved in are there and cannot be fully answered today. We will see what happens in the next few weeks. We will keep you informed.