Everything we know about AMD Navi, including the expected release date, expectations of performance, speculation on specs, and pricing information.
AMD hasn’t released a truly new GPU architecture for its graphics cards since its RX Vega line in 2017, over 18 months ago. Sure, the Radeon VII and RX 590 are new models, but both represent die shrinks and tuning of the existing Vega and Polaris (respectively) architectures. The Polaris architecture dates back to mid-2016, a three-year hiatus for the midrange graphics card market, but there are rumblings coming from the earth suggesting that’s about to change. AMD Navi release date
After bringing the Radeon VII to the consumer market in February, I wondered if that might be it for AMD’s 7nm GPU aspirations in 2019. Thankfully, it appears I was overly pessimistic, and there are plenty of indications that AMD will be unveiling both its Ryzen 3000 CPUs and Navi 10 GPUs at Computex in late May/early June. Or at least, the press will be briefed on the new CPUs and GPUs—several other rumors indicate a July 7 retail launch date for Navi. That’s 7/7 if you’re wondering, a not-so-subtle indication of AMD’s use of TSMC’s 7nm lithography.
I’m not fully sold on the 7/7 launch date, but it’s almost certain we’ll see new AMD Navi GPUs sometime in the June to August time frame. As to what those GPUs will actually entail, things start to get a lot less clear. AMD Navi specifications
It’s no secret that AMD GPUs have fallen behind Nvidia offerings, in performance, efficiency, and features. This has been the status quo dating back to at least 2014, when Nvidia’s Maxwell architecture doubled down on efficiency, without sacrificing performance. That left the Radeon R9 family to compete primarily on price. Each new family of GPUs largely failed to close the gap, especially when it comes to power efficiency and even die sizes. AMD does compete on price, to varying degrees, but it’s time for a new design.
We know very little about the actual specs for Navi, other than it will use TSMC’s 7nm process technology. Budget and midrange focused Navi 10 models (and Navi 12, according to some rumors) will come first, and they’ll forego HBM2, opting for more economical GDDR6 and maybe even GDDR5 memory. A higher performance Navi 20 design is expected to come later—though how much later isn’t clear.
