Losing hope of simply competitive prices with high and mid-range graphics cards now everything focuses on the low-end of these that will arrive with a smaller size VRAM and, in theory, out of the reach of miners. Navi 24 will be one of the greatest exponents in terms of chips, since it will give life to the RX 6500 XT and RX 6400, but although we knew a lot about him, he has a series of surprises.
By definition we are definitely talking about the smallest and most powerful chip inside RDNA 2 graphics cards. You get a total area of only 141 mm2, making it the smallest chip ever created within the global RDNA architecture. This is possible because it will be the first graphics chip that will arrive in the new 6 nm of TSMC, where it also comes with a surprise included.
One chip, two versions: this is Navi 24 XT
The XT version of this die will be the most powerful of the two that AMD will launch on the market and therefore it will be implemented in the RX 6500 XT exclusively. Logically it is the complete chip and therefore its performance is the best, housing itself two Shader Engines with 64 SPs and 16 Compute Units that give a total of 1024 Shaders.
This means that at this point it has half that of the top Navi 23 chip, something that will also be reflected in its memory bus of 64 bit.
Although it will use GDDR6 as the key VRAM, the Infinity Cache is reduced from 46MB to only 16 MB, which is the biggest jump down of the entire range of Navi chips, something really curious and that would result in a lower internal bandwidth that is only understood from the point of view of the cost of the card.
What has also been revealed is that the RX 6500 XT will have a consumption of 107 watts, so it will require a 6-pin connector for its power. This is deductible due to the high frequency that you will get, where as we saw in its day it could be among the 2.8 GHz and the 3 GHz, réhistorical cord on GPUs.
Navi 24 XL
Obviously, we are talking about the chip that will give life to AMD’s RX 6400, the cheapest and least powerful GPU of the entire 6000 series. 768 Shaders, but maintains GDDR6 memory with a capacity of 4GB, which means that AMD sees such capacity as necessary as an acceptable minimum.
On the other hand, the frequency will reach the 2.5 GHz at least, although the final boost is not really clear. What we do know is that your bandwidth will be 112 GB / s and that its consumption will reach up to 53 watts, so it does not need external power and the PCIe will suffice.
The surprise with this chip is that according to the photos of it and the lack of certain SMDs make us think that AMD has capped the PCIe 4.0 bus at a speed of x4. Why? Well, it’s simple: manufacturing costs and simplification of the use of simpler PCBs, with fewer active pins in the connector and therefore the fall in the size of the Infinity Cache would be understood.
On January 4 we will leave doubts.