The AMD Radeon HD 7000 series is a new generation of graphics cards manufactured using TSMC’s 28 nm manufacturing process. The 7000 series is designed to compete with Nvidia’s GeForce 600 Series. This series shipped during Q1 2012 and is the company’s primary rival. While this series was released earlier, the new GPUs are a bit more powerful.
Navi 33 GPU
AMD is currently testing its Navi 33 GPU in its first batch of unreleased RX 7700 XT graphics cards. The GPU is built on a single die and is expected to be made on the 6nm production node. This should make the GPU half as expensive as the flagship Navi 21 GPU. It will also be significantly more powerful. But we’re still a few months away from seeing it on a consumer card.
The Navi 33 GPU is based on AMD’s Navi 3x architecture. It will launch alongside the Navi 31 and Navi 32 graphics cards later this year. The company is also expected to introduce the Navi 33 GPU on the AMD RX 7000 series later this year. However, AMD has not revealed the exact pricing of the GPU. It is expected to launch around the end of October or early November. AMD has a good reputation for launching new GPUs at an affordable price.
Interestingly, AMD plans to manufacture three different GPUs with this design. The Navi 31 is expected to power the highest end graphics cards in the Radeon RX 7000 series, while the Navi 32 and Navi 33 are expected to power more budget-friendly cards. Meanwhile, AMD is reportedly planning to add DisplayPort 2.0 inputs on its RDNA 3 GPUs as early as August 2021. This feature would be ideal for high-resolution 8K and 60Hz monitors. The new GPUs are also capable of supporting Display Stream Compression to support higher resolution displays, such as 16K/60Hz.
12,288 GPU shaders
AMD’s upcoming RX 7000 series will have up to 12,288 GPU shaders. This figure will be higher than the previous generation’s 10,096 GPU shaders. This is an increase of about 12 percent over the RX 6900XT, which had 11,288 shaders. The new model will be based on AMD’s new RDNA 3 architecture, which has several major improvements over its predecessors. This architecture has larger shaders and more infinity cache. A leak from Greymon55 also suggests that the Navi 31-based model could contain a dedicated machine learning chip.
AMD also plans to make an RDNA 3 architecture for the upcoming Navi 3x series of GPUs, with up to 50% more shaders and double the amount of Infinity Cache memory. The company has not announced a specific launch date for the RDNA 3 chips, but the company does plan to release them in 2021.
Currently, the Navi 21 die has eight 32-bit memory interfaces. This will be followed by the Navi 22 die with 192-bit memory interfaces. AMD is also working on the next version of RDNA, which will have a new shader architecture and a rearchitected compute unit. AMD hasn’t released any details about RDNA 3, but it should reduce the amount of FP64 hardware – which is mostly there for compatibility reasons and takes up more die space.
Memory speeds up to 20Gbps
According to a recent leak, the next-generation AMD Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards will offer memory speeds of up to 20Gbps. This represents an 11% increase over the current fastest memory solution in AMD RX 6000 cards. AMD is expected to equip the new graphics cards with the rDNA 3 based 7900 GPU.
The Ryzen 7000 series will support AMD’s Smart Access Storage, which speeds up data transfers between the CPU and graphics card. This feature also improves texture streaming. This technology is compatible with AMD’s Ryzen 7000 series CPUs and AMD Radeon graphics cards.
The Navi 33 is expected to feature a GPU die size of 360-460mm2, 128MB of Infinity Cache (a slim chance for 256MB), and eight gigabytes of GDDR6 memory. This new GPU is expected to have memory speeds of 18Gbps on “low-end” models, and 20Gbps in midrange models. The smaller 128-bit memory bus is expected to enable the Radeon RX 7700 XT to compete with the more expensive Radeon RX 6900 XT.
96-bit bus
The midrange and low-end RX 7000 series cards are set to come with AMD’s Navi 33 GPU, with 40 and 32 CUs respectively. The cards are also expected to come with 8GB of memory. The low-end RX 7500 XT is expected to feature 20 CUs, but it is not clear what RAM configurations it will come with.
The 96-bit bus is a drawback for this series, as it restricts the speed of the memory subsystem. As such, the 96-bit bus can be a bottleneck at high resolutions. AMD plans to increase the bus width on its future flagship graphics cards, so that they are more suitable for higher resolutions.
Rumors about AMD’s new GPUs are surfacing on Twitter. One person, greymon55, tweeted that the AMD RX 7000 series will launch in September. However, another source, Tech Advisor, suggests that AMD will release the new series in Q4 2022. This release date will coincide with the launch of the new AMD Ryzen 7000 chipset. However, AMD is releasing its GPUs in waves, so it is unlikely that the 7000 series will come out in one fell swoop.