AMD Big Navi leak teases a monstrous GPU — Nvidia should be worried

AMD Big Navi is going to be big in name and in nature, as a leaked image of the GPU chip at its heart shows a huge slice of silicon.

The alleged picture of the GPU die was spotted by technology analyst Coreteks, who claimed that Navi 21, aka Big Navi, will be the GPU at the center of the Radeon RX 6900 XT. That graphics card is set to spearhead the RX 6000 series and looks to challenge the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080. 

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All mentions of Big Navi and Navi 21 were scrubbed from the image Coreteks posted to help keep their sources anonymous, so we need to take this picture with a pinch of salt. 

But the analyst noted that through some speculative measurements, the GPU die comes in at 29mm high and 18.5mm wide, essentially 536mm squared. Basically, this is a big GPU and potentially the largest consumer graphics chip AMD has ever made. 

Now size isn’t everything, but a bigger die with the new 7-nanometer process node means more transistors can be squeezed into the GPU and thus deliver more power. Coreteks reckons that it will deliver 26.3 billion transistors, albeit by their own calculations rather than official leaked information.

With this large die and transistor count, Coreteks noted that the leaked image lends credence to the claim that the RDNA 2 architecture this Big Navi GPU is based on will deliver two times the performance of the older RDNA architecture. However, with this leak and other leaks, such as those that have supposedly revealed the clock speed of the GPU and how much memory it has, it’s still unclear where Big Navi’s performance will land. 

Some leaks suggest it will snap at the heels of the RTX 3080, which is a hugely powerful graphics card. But if AMD goes all out with Big Navi, we could even be looking at a graphics card that chases the mighty and very expensive GeForce RTX 3090. Big Navi and the Radeon RX 6000 series is set to be revealed on October 28, so we’ll know more in a matter of weeks. 

But if AMD can come up with a family of graphics cards that can challenge the performance of Nvidia’s new RTX 3000-series graphics cards, but deliver them at more affordable prices, then it could be onto a winner. Time will tell on this one.