Again our wildest speculations seem to be coming true and AMD‘s plans are reportedly going better than initially planned for their new graphics cards. And it is that the RX 7000 will arrive with important novelties that imply several strategies to follow and, above all, launch dates that are closer than expected. When will they arrive?
The most substantial change in 20 years in desktop graphics cards. So we could define what is coming to us with AMD alone and if the forecasts and rumors are fulfilled. Everything is still up in the air and we are sorry to tell you that it will continue like this until a week or a few days before, but you cannot put doors on the sea and the leaks will be correct to a greater or lesser extent. Are we closer than we think with these new AMD GPUs?
Two chips to fight NVIDIA
The information that has been leaked today is consistent with the speculations that we launched almost 15 days ago and is nothing more than a massive arrival to fight NVIDIA and its RTX 40. Three chips are currently in the oven with different dates in the stage called Tape Out: N31, N33 and N32 in that order, at least as reported by the leaker.
n31 tape-out Q3 2021
n33 tape-out Q4 2021
n32 tape-out Q1 2022
– Greymon55 (@ greymon55) April 27, 2022
As we well know the N31 refers to the high-end chips, and we say chips in the plural because there are rumors in the air again, so we will once again launch a speculation on the occasion of everything we know. Navi 31 will have at least two strands, possibly three, where at least one of them will be a MCM GPU with two 5nm chiplets and possibly a 6nm I/O Die .
The total count would amount to 15,360 shaders , which would mean that we would be looking at two die with 7,680 cores with, in theory, 120 CUs each . This means 40 more CUs per chip and 2,560 additional Shaders, or what is the same, an increase of 50% die by die, not counting the other chip that shoots up the figure to the aforementioned total Shaders.
AMD RX 7000 Release Date
With that said and the feature set in place, AMD has stepped up production of the N31 and N33 with TSMC, but there’s one very important detail to this. And it is that the mid-range GPUs will arrive first for a very interesting fact, and this would be nothing more than the way to build a GPU with Navi 31, where we have to look Apple directly in the eye.
And it is that TSMC would not use its CoWoS 2.5D technology with Navi 31, mainly because there should be no vertical stacking in it, but an InFO-LI packaging in the purest Intel EMIB style. That is, TSMC would use its Chip-to-Chip Local Interconnect Bus technology as it does with the M1 Ultra, which is nothing more than two M1 Max joined by a substrate and LSI .
Being technical, the two chips that will make up Navi 31 will be connected with Integrated Fan-OUT through local interconnection based on a silicon interposer and between them there will be an RDL redistribution layer.
This is important, very important in fact and affects the output of high-end graphics cards. The why is simple: they are much more technically complicated to manufacture, and more expensive, so neither AMD nor TSMC can have a low success rate on wafers. To use as a “guinea pig” they have Navi 33 and hence the Tape Out dates.
First they start with the most complicated and that will take more time, then you start with the easiest chip to throw it before since it will take you really less time and in the meantime you prepare the reinforcement to your opponent’s hit with the mid-range chip.
In short, the mid-range graphics cards will arrive first, then the high-end ones to counteract the RTX 40 of equivalent performance and after that you hit the upper-middle range with Navi 32.
Ok, but when are these dates? when is the presentation? In the month of August for N31 and N33, where the latter would arrive in September and the former for the Christmas season or even a little earlier, there is still a lot of controversy in the air, but when it comes to speculation it seems that it is most likely after the breakthrough in TSMC’s 5nm production. And so far the supposed and future launch of the RX 7000 .