Late last year, AMD launched high end RDNA 3 with the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT. Now, they’ve rolling out smaller versions of RDN

AMD’s RX 7600: Small RDNA 3 Appears

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2023-06-04 18:00:04

Late last year, AMD launched high end RDNA 3 with the Radeon RX 7900 XTX and Radeon RX 7900 XT. Now, they’ve rolling out smaller versions of RDNA 3 targeted towards more cost-conscious market segments. The Radeon RX 7600 replaces the Radeon RX 6600 XT in AMD’s lineup, providing slightly better performance. Reviewers generally agree that the RX 7600 is a disappointing product, because it doesn’t offer much better cost per frame than the outgoing RX 6600 XT, and will be limited by its 8 GB of VRAM. Thankfully (for us), Jiray has taken one for the team and bought a RX 7600 for testing.

AMD’s RX 7600 uses the Navi 33 chip, a monolithic design featuring 16 WGPs, 2 MB of L2 cache, and 32 MB of Infinity Cache. A 128-bit bus connects the die to 8 GB of GDDR6, providing 288 GB/s of theoretical VRAM bandwidth. That contrasts with Navi 31’s chiplet design, which puts 96 MB of Infinity Cache and 384-bits worth of memory controllers on separate dies. Navi 33 has less compute, cache, and memory controllers, which means a much smaller and low cost die. A complex chiplet setup with an interposer likely didn’t provide a cost benefit. On top of that, Navi 33 is fabricated on TSMC’s 6 nm node, not their cutting edge 5 nm process. TSMC’s 6 nm process is also used on Zen 4’s IO die and Navi 31’s memory controller dies. AMD’s Zen 4 CPUs and Navi 31’s graphics compute die use the more expensive 5 nm process, so Navi 33 definitely prioritizes low cost over maximum performance.

RDNA 3 is the third iteration of AMD’s RDNA line of GPU architectures, and features a set of improvements its workgroup processor (WGP), the architecture’s basic building block. We covered those in a previous article, where we talked about dual issue capability, the larger L0 vector cache, and vector register file capacity increase. These mostly apply to the RX 7600 too, but smaller RDNA 3 doesn’t get the larger register file.

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