An AMD PCB claimed to be that of an unreleased AMD Navi graphics card has surfaced on the web. The upcoming graphics card architecture expected to replace Polaris isn’t expected until later in the year – further announcements expected at Computex – but AMD is sure to be finalising designs and ramping up manufacturing right about now if it hopes to launch with significant numbers when that day comes.
The PCB has been snapped entirely in the buff, scooped from a now defunct page on Baidu by serial leaker Komachi_Ensaka. While that means that we have no actual silicon to speculate over, the supposed Navi board’s naked footprint offers us a lot of information regardless.
There are a total of eight memory locations on the board – a pin configuration likely intended for 8GB of GDDR6. There’s potential for more capacity depending on the memory density of the chips AMD decide upon, but 8GBs feels plenty for the mainstream market. Fitted with a 256-bit memory interface and utilising, let’s say, Samsung’s mass-volume GDDR6 8Gb chip at 14Gbps, that would result in a bandwidth of 448GB/s. Just a little shy of double the RX580’s 256GB/s bandwidth.
The PCB is provisioned for a chunky power delivery, too. There’s space for eight phases of VRM, along with one more phase reserved for memory, all powered by two eight-pin PCIe power connectors.
[Baidu] 突然接到AMD的订单 https://t.co/cdFmj4DAIo pic.twitter.com/UkZNOQFdx5
— 比屋定さんの戯れ言@Komachi (@KOMACHI_ENSAKA) April 27, 2019
AMD’s GCN architecture isn’t one for power-saving – at least not in comparison to Nvidia’s latest – and even the RX 580 utilises an 8+6 PCIe power delivery. However, the setup on this PCB looks particularly broad for a mainstream GPU, and it could be this rather capable setup is reserved for testing and evaluation. Either that or the red team are juicing Navi and the GCN architecture to high heaven in order to compete with the green team.
Su or Huang? This is the best graphics card to buy right now
As for outputs, AMD is sticking to its word and has at least provisioned for USB Type-C, or VirtualLink. This VR-specific output joins the usual suspects: DisplayPort and HDMI. DVI output looks to have been nixxed on this particular board, so get your active adapters ready, folks.
We suspect AMD will discuss Navi in more detail come Computex at the end of May. That’s also when the company is suspected to unleash AMD Ryzen 3000 CPUs unto the world.