AMD’s next move with Navi may be to go smaller – Navi CU count leaked

So what’s next for AMD’s RDNA graphics architecture? The Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT (see our review here) are now here, but what#s team Radeon’s next move? 

A new Radeon graphics card that’s reportedly called “Navi 14” has appeared on the Compubench database, revealing a graphics card that seems to be smaller than the Navi 10 silicon that’s used in the RX 5700 series, suggesting that Navi will become smaller before it hits the ultra-high-end market. 

Compubench misreads AMD’s new RDNA architecture, seeing AMD’s pairs of new compute units as single entities, reading 20 CUs instead of 40 CUs for AMD’s RX 5700 XT. Assuming the same applies to Navi 14, AMD’s next RDAN graphics card will feature 24 CUs and a total of 1536 stream processors.    

With this core count in mind, it looks like AMD’s Navi 14 GPU will become the GPU core behind AMD’s RX 5600 series, replacing AMD’s Polaris graphics lineup in the low-end of the GPU market. With 24 CUs, Navi 14 sits between the RX 560 and RX 570 in terms of stream processor count, but Navi’s combination of higher clock speeds and IPC improvements will result in an incredible boost to graphics performance. 

So what’s the point in Navi 14? Simple, offering low-cost, low-power graphics to the masses. Navi 14 could bring Radeon into notebooks in a way that hasn’t been possible for several hardware generations. Navi 14 could also become the GPU behind Apple’s next-generation MacBooks, with today utilise AMD’s Polaris-based RX 560 silicon.