AMD is soon going to announce their next-generation Navi GPUs for Radeon graphics card which will be aiming desktop gaming PCs. While the announcement is scheduled for 27th May, a printed circuit board shot of what seems to be the next-gen AMD Radeon RX Navi based graphics card has leaked out (via Komachi).
AMD Navi GPU Based Graphics Card PCB Leaks Out - Designed For Radeon Cards, Features GDDR6 VRAM Along a 256-bit Bus
The alleged PCB seems to be of a high-end graphics card based on the 7nm Navi GPU. It's certainly not a entry level graphics card based on the specs we are looking at and could be a proper Radeon RX 580 / RX 590 replacement that should fall under the Radeon 600 series family.
So coming to the details, we see the large ball grid array for the GPU and VRAM. We can't say for sure which GPU or which Navi variant this card would utilize but it would probably be a high-end design. Around the GPU package, we can spot BGA's for 8 DRAM packages. Looking closely, the BGA package size is 180 which means this card will be using GDDR6 memory making them the first AMD based card to utilize the new standard.
The 8 DRAM packages also confirm a 256-bit interface for the bus which shows that this card would be placed somewhere around the RTX 2070 which also features a 256-bit bus interface and 8 GB of GDDR6 VRAM. Only the front side of the PCB has the BGA packages which suggest the card would feature 8 GB of VRAM since the backside of the PCB cannot be utilized for extra DRAM placement.
As far as display connectors are concerned, we are looking at two DisplayPort, a single HDMI and also what seems to be a USB Type-C port at the bottom left side of the PCB. AMD could be following in NVIDIA's footsteps who offered USB Type-C Virtual Link connector on their RTX 20 series cards.
In terms of power delivery, the card rocks an 8 phase VRM and power is provided through two PCIe connectors. The cutouts are for 8-pin connectors but it's up to the manufacturers to use them as 8 or 6 pin power outlets. More on the power delivery system of this PCB is detailed by Buildzoid in his video which can be seen below:
This could still be a very early design which may be vastly different than the retail model which we receive months later but it's still interesting as the design choices here seem to indicate what kind of product AMD is working on. And since at least two PCBs were pictured next to each other, you can very much believe that this card is under production right now and we can see a final model by Computex.
We know a few tidbits about the features the AMD Navi GPUs would support such as Ray Tracing which was recently confirmed to be a highlight on the next-gen Sony and Microsoft consoles which are utilizing AMD Navi 10 GPUs and Zen 2 based Ryzen CPUs. There was also talk about Variable Rate Shading being introduced on Navi GPUs as a bid by AMD to more modernize their Radeon graphics card for the mainstream market.
Navi would possibly be the last GPU architecture based on AMD's GCN (Graphics Core Next) DNA. It was confirmed through AMD's Linux driver that Navi is indeed based on GCN and has the latest GFX1010 codename while Vega was termed as GFX900. There would be some major improvements made on the Navi architecture in terms of IPC and 7nm efficiency would be a showcase of the new cards, providing more drastic results compared to the Radeon VII which was also 7nm based but was simply a die shrunk Vega 10 GPU (Vega 20).
Expect to hear more about the upcoming Navi GPUs at Computex 2019 on 27th of May where CEO Lisa Su will be presenting the opening keynote and announcing their next-gen products.
