AMD's Entry-Level Radeon Laptop And Desktop RDNA 2 GPU Specs Allegedly Surface
This past Saturday we reported on the possible existence of some low-powered Radeon cards based on a long-rumored but as-yet-unseen Navi 24 GPU. Well, today it seems like those products are inching ever closer to market. News has come to us revealing key specifications of the Radeon RX 6500 XT and RX 6400, as well as confirmation of the existence of mobile GPUs based on the same chip.
Let's start with the mobile parts, shall we? Buried in the latest Radeon driver, version number 21.40.1, AMD has marked down spaces for four heretofore unannounced mobile graphics parts: The Radeon RX 6500M, RX 6300M, Radeon PRO W6500M, and PRO W6300M. Device IDs for these parts are in the 7420-743F range, which according to previous entries in the Linux kernel, correspond to the "Beige Goby" low-end Navi 24 GPU.
Ultimately we can only really guess at the specifications of these parts for now, but we can infer a bit from the other news. Citing a "good source," the folks over at Videocardz have what they say is solid data on AMD's littlest RDNA 2 Radeon cards. The leaker says that the Radeon RX 6500 XT will bear a fully-enabled Navi 24 GPU, and that said GPU will have (as we expected Saturday) 8 Work Group Processors (WGPs) giving it a total of 1,024 shader cores.
That GPU will supposedly link up with 4GB of GDDR6 memory across a 64-bit bus running at 14 Gbps, giving it 112 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. Assuming that's accurate, we can probably expect the RX 6500M and the PRO W6500M to have similar specifications, perhaps with twice the memory on the PRO model. The unnamed source also says that the RX 6500 XT will require a standard power connector, so its power draw is likely to be over 75W.
The source also claims that the Radeon RX 6400 will drop two WGPs, giving it a total of 768 shader cores. That seems to be the biggest hardware difference, as the site claims that this card will also come with 4GB of GDDR6 memory on a 64-bit bus. It also seems likely that the GPU clock (and possibly the memory) will be detuned slightly to help it fit under a 75W total board power. That way it can be slot-powered.
Notably, all of the above parts are based on the Navi 24 "Beige Goby" GPU, which is purported to be a full implementation of the RDNA 2 GPU architecture. For those playing along at home, this means that these parts will come with support for hardware ray tracing acceleration. Each RDNA 2 WGP has two "ray accelerators," giving the RX 6500 XT a total of 16, while the RX 6400 will have a dozen. This isn't much ray-tracing performance to write home about, but it may serve in lighter titles with a heavy application of FSR on top.
Obviously, the laptop parts will be in laptops, and we're unlikely to hear about those too far before their release. However, the leaker says that the lower-end discrete cards will show up in the first quarter of next year. These parts probably won't be too attractive to scalpers and miners, so folks aching for any GPU at all may not have much longer to wait.
