According to a new leak, AMD may be working on new mobility graphics cards for gamers, currently dubbed the RX 6000S series.
The RDNA 2 6nm GPUs are rumored to be a refresh of the RX 6000 laptop line of graphics cards and may offer a performance boost combined with lower power requirements.
Although there is little information about the alleged mobility graphics cards, there is enough to piece together from several sources. The first and main change is the switch from 7nm to 6nm: It’s likely that AMD RX 6000S would be based on TSMC’s 6nm process. It’s unclear which of the current AMD graphics cards are due for a revamp. Some leaks suggested the creation of the RX 6900M, but the most recent rumors point to the RX 6800S being the first in line.
Assuming the card in question is indeed the RX 6800S, we can expect to see the same bus and core count of the current 6800M GPU. This means 2,560 cores and a 192-bit bus interface. The clock speed, memory size, and bandwidth all are unclear right now, although the 6800M has a 2.3GHz frequency that the new card is likely to beat.
The news comes from Disclosuzen, a Twitter user whose account has recently been suspended. However, there is more than one source to this story — Greymon55, a well-known leaker, also speculated a few months ago that AMD may be about to refresh its Navi 2X graphics cards.
Switching from a 7nm (which AMD’s current laptop GPUs are based on) to a 6nm process node could prove beneficial, offering better performance at lower power requirements. TSMC, the semiconductor foundry that AMD works with to create these GPUs, claims that the 6nm process offers 18% higher logic density compared to the 7nm.
It’s hard to tell this early on what kind of realistic performance gains we can expect from the switch to 6nm. One thing to remember is that more efficiency is never a bad thing in a laptop, and if the card becomes less power-hungry due to the switch, that alone will be an improvement. Some of the best gaming laptops on the current market are rather thin and packed full of components, so lowering the power requirements may also improve temperatures within the chassis.
For those who favor laptop gaming, exciting times are ahead. AMD is not the only manufacturer set to release new mobility GPUs in the near future. Nvidia is said to be set to reaveal the RTX 3080 Ti and the RTX 3070 Ti for laptops in early 2022, and Intel will be launching the Arc Alchemist GPU around the same time as well.
Given the current state of the graphics card market, more GPUs are never a bad thing. The new RX 6000S cards are likely to launch alongside the Ryzen Rembrandt APU series in early 2022.
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