Step aside, Ampere! AMD Radeon RX 6000 specifications are revealed in the macOS Big Sur code. And these are very fast chips
Many believe that such a serious jump in performance and relatively democratic prices for the 8nm GeForce RTX 30 Ampere family are due to the fact that NVIDIA was aware of the power of future AMD graphics cards based on the RDNA 2 architecture. Perhaps we will really get something impressive. At least, this is indicated by the analysis of the macOS Big Sur code.
One of the regulars on the Reddit forums, who dug deep into the code of the preliminary version of the macOS Big Sur operating system, found specifications for the AMD Navi 21, Navi 22, and Navi 23 GPUs. processors.
macOS code clearly and clearly defines the number of CUs that each GPU will have: Navi 21 will receive 80 CU, Navi 22 – 40, and Navi 23 – 32. Assuming that each compute unit corresponds to sixty-four shader processors, as in modern RDNA cards, accelerators will receive 5 120, 2 560, and 2048 shader processors, respectively. The clock speeds for each accelerator are not so accurate, but the driver indicates frequencies from 2 to 2.5 GHz. Also mentioned is the Navi 31 GPU with 80 CU (5 120 shader processors), but there is no other information about this chip yet – at least another year will pass before its release. Even energy consumption values are indicated.
All of this information was pulled from the AmdRadeonX6000HwServices file in the newest macOS 11 Beta Big Sur. The beta version is publicly available and therefore easy to verify. Of course, one can assume that AMD provided Apple with inaccurate information about the video cards, or that the architecture has changed so significantly that the CUs now use fewer shader processors, but these are unlikely scenarios.
Clock speeds and TDP are usually not updated immediately prior to release, so it is better to consider these values as a rough guideline that accelerators are capable of. The table shows that the characteristics of Navi 10, indicated in the same file, differ slightly from the specifications of the real RX 5700 XT – the current flagship video card from AMD: both the frequency and TDP of the retail card are higher.
Of course, it’s hard to say how the cards will perform in reality, and the declared TDP values seem too good for RDNA 2. Nevertheless, there is reason to hope for the good competition from AMD, and not only due to the price. AMD plans to announce the Radeon RX 6000 Big Navi graphics cards on October 28.
By the way, the same informant extracted information from the macOS Big Sur code about future AMD hybrid processors with the codenames Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Rembrandt, which we wrote about earlier.
