Radeon RX 6950 XT rumored to be coming sooner than previous reports claimed
The purported details of the Radeon graphics cards refresh – the new performance–boosting 7nm GPU RDNA 2 models that AMD is reportedly preparing – seems to be constantly changing. Not long after the very first more solid sources emerged, the leaks are growing in number. A few days ago we reported that these cards were expected in June or July, but actually, the highest performance model could come a lot sooner than that.
The news about the refreshed Radeon RX 6000 graphics was shared by Coreteks, a graphics cards leaker and reviewer active on Twitter, who has correctly predicted the release of AMD graphics a few times in the past (as noted by VideoCardz, a site that has a good grasp on the credibility of various sources).
According to Coreteks, at least the highend model will come out much sooner, and AMD reportedly has it scheduled for mid–April. This model is to be called the Radeon RX 6950 XT and will be an speedbump version of the fully functional Navi 21 GPU, which AMD now only sells in the Radeon RX 6900 XT. So in about ten weeks, that model could be replaced by a more powerful successor.
Radeon RX 6950 XT will still have 5120 shaders/80 Ray Accelerators (the GPU has 80 CUs) and 128MB of Infinity Cache. It’s possible that it will have increased GPU clock speeds as well as TDP. But so far, all we tentatively “know” is that this card will come withthe same 16GB of GDDR6 memory as the current model, but clocked at 18.0GHz instead of 16.0GHz, giving it a bandwidth of 576GB/s (versus 512GB/s for the RX 6900 XT). The card could possibly resemble the special water-cooled version of the RX 6900 XT LC, which is itself a de facto different model (XTX or XTXH), but AMD chose to not market it as such. We’ll see if the RX 6950 XT pushes the performance even further, or if it’ll just be the unofficial XTX card under a new name.
We don’t know what the TDP or the price will look like (MSRP that is, the street price will again depend on the state of the cryptocurrency bubble).
The same Coreteks does provide some further details though. So far, his sources reportedly only know just about this one model, not about any other refreshed cards. Previous sources claimed that there could eventually be a Radeon RX 6750 XT, which would be a refresh of the Navi 22 GPU. AMD reportedly intends to make these faster xx50 SKUs only for the cards using fully functional versions of the Navi 22 and 21 chips, which could mean that the Radeon RX 6850 XT and/or RX 6850 (which would be using cut-down Navi 21 dies with just 72 and 60 CU) are not in the plans.
According to Coreteks, Radeon RX 6950 XT is also 100% confirmed as using a 7nm chip, which means the original Navi 21 die. This means AMD has not made a new version of this GPU using the 6nm process, something which was sometimes speculated in the past.
See also: Refresh of Radeon RX 6000 mid-year, a 75W Radeon RX 6500 also expected
Sources: Coreteks (1, 2, 3), VideoCardz
English translation and edit by Jozef Dudáš, original text by Jan Olšan, editor for Cnews.cz
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