AMD Big Navi leak reveals big boost speeds to fight Nvidia RTX 3080

News
By
published

AMD Big Navi clock speed leaks — Nvidia RTX 30080 should be worried

AMD Radeon RX 6000
(Image credit: AMD)

Another leak for AMD’s upcoming Radeon RX 6000 series, which includes the Big Navi graphics cards, has popped up in Apple’s macOS BigSur 11 beta. And by the looks of things, AMD's new cards could boast promising performance to challenge the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. 

A Reddit user posted some specs for both Big Navi (aka Navi 21) and Navi 22, a less powerful GPU going by the codename of Navy Flounder. The specs have a lot of information that was leaked in a recent Linux update, but this time reveals some tidbits about clock speeds. 

The latest leaks have Big Navi tipped to come with 80 compute units (CUs) and 5,120 stream processors, and the new leak notes one version of Big Navi will ramp up to a clock speed of 2.2GHz. Comparatively, the standard edition GeForce RTX 3080 boosts up to 1.71GHz. 

And our sister site Tom’s Hardware noted that Navi 21 could deliver single-precision performance of 22.5 Tflops. That’s an impressive figure but it falls short of the GeForce RTX 3080’s 29.8 Tflops, which means that Big Navi might not be the “Nvidia-killer” it has been previously championed as.  

Interestingly, Navi 22 is tipped to reach a clock speed of 2.5Ghz. But it will supposedly have 2,560 stream processors and 40 CUs. All that means it is tipped to deliver 12.8 Tflops of performance. 

Both graphics cards look set to offer a strong upgrade over the Radeon RX 5700 XT and RX 5700, which are based on the older RDNA architecture. The Radeon RX 6000 series will use AMD's RDNA 2 architecture, which the PS5 and Xbox Series X GPUs are also using. 

Reference was also made to Navi 31, which Tom’s Hardware noted could come with the same stream processors and CUs as Big Navi but potentially have a higher clock speed and increased performance. But most notably it will apparently have AMD’s RDNA 3 GPU architecture, potentially making it a future refresh of Big Navi. 

It’s worth pointing out that Mac machines tend to use Radeon Pro graphics cards, so the clock speeds and teraflops performance might not be correct for consumer variants that can be popped into gaming PCs. 

The Radeon RX 6000 series is expected to be revealed on October 28. So we haven’t got too long to wait to see what AMD has in store for its next-generation graphics cards.    

Roland Moore-Colyer
Roland Moore-Colyer

Roland Moore-Colyer a Managing Editor at Tom’s Guide with a focus on news, features and opinion articles. He often writes about gaming, phones, laptops and other bits of hardware; he’s also got an interest in cars. When not at his desk Roland can be found wandering around London, often with a look of curiosity on his face.