[Hardware] AMD Radeon RX 7000 Graphics Cards With RDNA 3 GPUs Confirmed To Feature Higher Power Consumption

[luminox™-]

In an interview with Tomshardware, AMD's Senior Vice President, Sam Naffziger, has hinted that the next-gen RDNA 3 GPUs powering the Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards will feature higher power consumption than existing solutions while still delivering 50% perf/watt gains.

 

AMD Radeon RX 7000 Graphics Cards With RDNA 3 GPUs To Be More Power Hungry Than RDNA 2-Powered Radeon RX 6000 Series

Both AMD and NVIDIA are expected to heavily focus on efficiency and GPU power design of their next-gen GPUs to deliver higher performance. We have seen various leaks for NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 40 series graphics cards which are expected to rock up to 600W designs. Meanwhile, AMD is saying that while they announced a more than 50% performance per watt uplift over the previous generation, that doesn't mean that power levels aren't going to go up for RDNA 3 'Radeon RX 7000' series graphics cards.

 

“It's really the fundamentals of physics that are driving this,” Naffziger explained. "The demand for gaming and compute performance is, if anything, just accelerating, and at the same time, the underlying process technology is slowing down pretty dramatically — and the improvement rate. So the power levels are just going to keep going up. Now, we've got a multi-year roadmap of very significant efficiency improvements to offset that curve, but the trend is there.”

 

"Performance is king," stated Naffziger, "but even if our designs are more power-efficient, that doesn't mean you don't push power levels up if the competition is doing the same thing. It's just that they'll have to push them a lot higher than we will."

 

If you remember, a few months back, we had seen rumors of the AMD RDNA 3-powered Radeon RX 7000 series offering TDPs of up to 400W. That's a 100W increase over the existing Navi 21 GPU that goes up to 335W (Navi 21 KXTX). So if AMD is to achieve a 2x performance gain over its existing chip lineup, the TDP should end up close to 450W which is the same as the one rumored for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 BFGPU. At the same time, the peak power and operational power may vary a lot and Sam is pretty confident when he says that the competition will have to push the power higher (a lot higher) than they will.

 

 

Furthermore, next-gen graphics cards with over 400-450W TBP will have to utilize the brand new PCIe Gen 5 connectors considering triple 8-pin connectors can only go as far as up to 450W & no company has made that design choice for their reference cards at least (yet). So whether AMD is looking to go the triple 8-pin route or gonna end up with the new PCIe Gen 5 connector that will conform to the ATX 3.0 standard and deliver stable performance, remains to be seen from the AMD camp.

 

 

Some of the key features of the RDNA 3 GPUs highlighted by AMD will include:

• 5nm Process Node
• Advanced Chiplet Packaging
• Rearchitected Compute Unit
• Optimized Graphics Pipeline
• Next-Gen AMD Infinity Cache
• >50% Perf/Watt vs RDNA 2

 

AMD RDNA 3 Navi 3X GPU Configurations (Preliminary)

GPU Name	Navi 21	Navi 33	Navi 32	Navi 31	Navi 3X
GPU Process	7nm	6nm	5nm/6nm	5nm/6nm	5nm/6nm
GPU Package	Monolithic	Monolithic	MCM	MCM	MCM
Shader Engines	4	2	4	6	8
GPU WGPs	40	20-16	40-32	60-48	64
SPs Per WGP	128	256	256	256	256
Compute Units (Per Die)	80	40-32	160 -128 (Total)	240-192 (Total)	128 (per GPU) 256 (Total)
Cores (Per Die)	5120	5120-4096	10240-8192	15360-12288	8192
Cores (Total)	5120	5120-4096	10240-8192	15360-12288	16,384
Memory Bus	256-bit	128-bit	256-bit	384-bit	384-bit x2?
Memory Type	GDDR6	GDDR6	GDDR6	GDDR6	GDDR6
Memory Capacity	Up To 16 GB	Up To 8 GB	Up To 16 GB	Up To 24 GB	Up To 32 GB
Infinity Cache	128 MB	128-256 MB	384 MB	512 MB	TBD
Flagship SKU	Radeon RX 6900 XTX	Radeon RX 7700 XT?	Radeon RX 7800 XT?	Radeon RX 7900 XT?	Radeon Pro
TBP	330W	~200W	~300W	~400W	TBD
Launch	Q4 2020	Q4 2022?	Q4 2022?	Q4 2022?	2023?