Radeon RX 7000: With 20 percent less shaders
Shader numbers for the Radeon RX 7000, specifically Navi 31 to 33, have been making the rounds recently. There are now new figures indicating that Navi 31 will sell 20% fewer units. That makes for an interesting topic of discussion.
Data about the chips for the Geforce RTX 4000 was already circulating in the rumor mill, and now the chefs for the Radeon RX 7000 are following suit. Initially, three RDNA 3 models - Navi 31, 32, and 33 - are scheduled to be released in a staggered fashion.
Navi 31 and 32 will be multi-chip designs, however, Navi 33 will be monolithic. There were already remarks on the shader setup for all three, which were 15,360, 10,240, and 5,120.
The new statements are as follows:
- Navi 31: 12,288 SPs, 48 WGPs, 12 SAs, 6 SEs
- Navi 32: 8,192 SPs, 32 WGPs, 8 SAs, 4 SEs
- Navi 33: 4,096 SPs, 16 WGPs, 4 SAs, 2 SEs
This is slightly less than what was communicated on previous days. It's possible that the true numbers are being reported here, notwithstanding recent talk of maximum expansion.
As usual, this demonstrates that you shouldn't take all rumors seriously, because something doesn't quite line together. When looking at Navi 31, for example, there is a 20% difference on paper between the information from Redfire and the earlier information from Greymon55, among others.
The structure is where everyone agrees - according to both rumors, Navi 31 has three shader engines, each with two arrays and five workgroups, but with differing amounts of execution units. The manner in which this occurs is debatable.
If you use a calculator and assume that the 15,360 is good for the claimed 92 teraflops at 3 GHz, there are still 73 teraflops left. However, one can hypothesize in this case. One possibility is that the lower values correspond to non-XT models.
However, a 20% difference might be acceptable. Finally, because Nvidia is your biggest competitor, you must always keep an eye on what they are doing. Even if you eliminate their top model, you are up against the Geforce RTX 4080, which has 10,752 according to the most recent status.
A Navi 31 card (likely the RX 7900/XT) would then be more useful in this area.
