AMD Announces Radeon RX 5600 Series: A Lighter Navi To Rule 1080p Gaming
by Ryan Smith on January 6, 2020 5:46 PM ESTRadeon RX 5600 For OEMs, & Radeon RX5600M For Mobile
While the biggest part of today’s Radeon RX 5600 series launch is the retail desktop for obvious reasons, this is not the only market AMD will be addressing. The company believes they have a winning part in the works, and to that end they are going to extend the Radeon RX 5600 series over the entire market, covering OEM desktop and mobile as well.
Starting things off for the OEM desktop side, AMD will also be releasing the Radeon RX 5600 for that market. Similar to what we saw with the OEM-only Radeon RX 5500, the Radeon RX 5600 is a similar, but slightly slower part. The big difference here is that while clockspeeds and TBPs remain unchanged, these OEM parts will only ship with 32 CUs enabled instead of 36 CUs enabled.
| AMD Radeon RX OEM Specification Comparison | ||||||
| AMD Radeon RX 5600 (OEM) | AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT | AMD Radeon RX 5500 (OEM) | AMD Radeon RX 5700 | |||
| CUs | 32 (2048 SPs) |
36 (2304 SPs) |
22 (1408 SPs) |
36 (2304 SPs) |
||
| Texture Units | 128 | 144 | 88 | 144 | ||
| ROPs | 64 | 64 | 32 | 64 | ||
| Base Clock | 1265MHz? | 1265MHz? | ? | 1465MHz | ||
| Game Clock | 1375MHz | 1375MHz | <=1670MHz | 1625MHz | ||
| Boost Clock | 1560MHz | 1560MHz | <=1845MHz | 1725MHz | ||
| Throughput (FP32) | 6.4 TFLOPs | 7.2 TFLOPs | <=5.2 TFLOPs | 7.95 TFLOPs | ||
| Memory Clock | 12 Gbps GDDR6 | 12 Gbps GDDR6 | 14 Gbps GDDR6 | 14 Gbps GDDR6 | ||
| Memory Bus Width | 192-bit | 192-bit | 128-bit | 256-bit | ||
| VRAM | 6GB | 6GB | 4GB/8GB | 8GB | ||
| Transistor Count | 10.3B | 10.3B | 6.4B | 10.3B | ||
| Typical Board Power | 150W | 150W | 150W | 180W | ||
| Manufacturing Process | TSMC 7nm | TSMC 7nm | TSMC 7nm | TSMC 7nm | ||
| Architecture | RDNA (1) | RDNA (1) | RDNA (1) | RDNA (1) | ||
| GPU | Navi 10 | Navi 10 | Navi 14 | Navi 10 | ||
| Launch Date | 01/21/2020 | 01/21/2020 | Q4 2019 | 07/07/2019 | ||
| Launch Price | N/A | $279 | N/A | $349 | ||
On paper, this gives the Radeon RX 5600 somewhere around 90% of the retail Radeon RX 5600 XT’s performance. The precise performance gap will vary with games and whether they’re compute/shader bound or pixel/bandwidth bound, but again, it’s a ballpark figure.
Meanwhile in the mobile space, the 5600 series will be rounded out by the Radeon RX 5600M. Unlike the OEM desktop card, AMD isn’t holding back any punches here, and the 5600M will ship with the same 36 CUs as the retail card.
| AMD Radeon RX Series Mobile Specification Comparison | ||||||
| AMD Radeon RX 5600M | AMD Radeon RX 5500M | AMD Radeon Vega Pro 20 | AMD Radeon RX 560X | |||
| CUs | 36 | 22 | 20 | 14/16 | ||
| Texture Units | 144 | 88 | 80 | 64 | ||
| ROPs | 64 | 32 | 32 | 16 | ||
| Game Clock | <=1375MHz | <=1448MHz | N/A | N/A | ||
| Boost Clock | <=1560MHz | <=1645MHz | 1300MHz | 1275MHz | ||
| Throughput (FP32) | <= 7.2 TFLOPs | <=4.6 TFLOPs | 3.3 TFLOPs | 2.6 TFLOPs | ||
| Memory Clock | 12 Gbps GDDR6 | 14 Gbps GDDR6 | 1.5 Gbps HBM2 | 7 Gbps GDDR5 | ||
| Memory Bus Width | 192-bit | 128-bit | 1024-bit | 128-bit | ||
| Max VRAM | 6GB | 4GB | 4GB | 4GB | ||
| Typical Board Power | N/A (Min: 60W) | 85W | ? | ? | ||
| Architecture | RDNA (1) | RDNA (1) | Vega (GCN 5) |
GCN 4 | ||
| GPU | Navi 10 | Navi 14 | Vega 12 | Polaris 11 | ||
| Launch Date | 01/21/2020 | 10/2019 | 10/2018 | 04/2018 | ||
But, like AMDs other Navi mobile parts, the clockspeeds and TDPs are up to the OEMs. So OEMs will be free to dial them up and down (to a degree) to hit the specific performance/power consumption they’re looking for in a laptop. Consequently, AMD doesn’t have a maximum TBP here, but they have set a minimum: 60 Watts. Radeon RX 5600M will not be a light chip.
It won’t be a small chip either, which is what makes this announcement particularly interesting. Since this is all based on Navi 10, any OEM using the RX 5600M will have to accommodate the moderately sized chip and its accompanying 6 GDDR6 chips. This shouldn’t be a challenge for OEMs, who already regularly include NVIDIA’s even larger chips, but to date AMD’s laptop wins have almost exclusively been their mobile-focused GPUs like Polaris 11 and Navi 14, which are available in low z-height packages. So the RX 5600M will require a greater commitment from laptop partners than what we’ve seen in the past, both with respect to power/cooling as well as sheer board space.
The OEM Radeon RX 5600 and the Radeon RX 5600M should be available soon. And with CES in full swing, there shouldn’t be any shortage of partners announcing systems with the new video cards over the next couple of days.
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Hul8 - Monday, January 6, 2020 - link
Since you're going to sleep, maybe you'll find such a GPU in your dreams? :-DSeriously, by the time such power efficiency comes around, iGPUs will also be able to do it. Or close enough, that the market for 1080p class GPUs disappears and you won't find any compelling models - just see the state of GT *030 or RX *40 today.
If nothing else, the low-end cards will always be gimped by memory type, bandwidth or capacity. Or you'll have only 2 display connections - hopefully both digital, at least...
PeachNCream - Monday, January 6, 2020 - link
Not too worried about multiple displays. I typically use a laptop and am fine with a single screen and really, that can be VGA for all I care. But yes, you do make a valid point with respect to iGPUs. They are reaching that point, but the trouble is that you can't easily purchase a sub-100 USD, refurb business desktop and get a modern iGPU so some sort of discrete graphics card is necessary. The 1030 isn't all that bad, really. I've seen half height versions around and even passively cooled versions though they appear to be wider than a single slot. It's just that they perform a lot better at 1366x768 for the time being.olde94 - Tuesday, January 7, 2020 - link
looking at a quadro RTX 4000 nothing stops them from making a single slot other than noise.further more performance scales worse and worse the higher the voltage, so it wouldn't surprise me if you could have good 1080p performance around 50W if you took an RTX 2080 ti and underclocked the hell out of it, in a similar manner to how max-Q works. but just.... even more Q
qhd - Tuesday, January 7, 2020 - link
More Q than Max-Q?? That's too Q to handle!GreenReaper - Tuesday, January 7, 2020 - link
Qinfinitely so.xenol - Tuesday, January 7, 2020 - link
The last single slot high-end video cards that I'm aware of, the 8800 GT and HD 3850, had TDPs of 125W and 105W respectively.Midrange cards have been in this range for a while now. If anything, I think AIBs don't want to design anymore coolers than they have to, so we have massive cooler designs meant for 180W+ parts cooling devices that output much less heat.
Spunjji - Tuesday, January 7, 2020 - link
Those single-slot cards had terrible thermal and noise characteristics, too - while the vast majority of cases that gaming GPUs go into have a surfeit of space.Given the choice between a slender card that hits a niche market and a bigger card that reviews well for low noise and good overclocking headroom, most companies make the smart choice.
CharonPDX - Tuesday, January 7, 2020 - link
The problem is that games keep increasing in quality to go with faster GPUs.You can play many older games at 1080p on modern half-height/single-slot cards no problem. Even at 144 Hz.
But not new games.
And those two statements are generally always true. (Well, since the first half-height/single-slot video card capable of outputting 1080p at all came out...)
PeachNCream - Tuesday, January 7, 2020 - link
I suspect that we will be seeing a substantial leap in system requirements toward the end of next year as next generation consoles are released It happens pretty much every time a console generation is released and it takes a while for the PC side of the house to catch up from a cost and performance perspective. For now it's been good times for new releases versus the affordability of the hardware available, but I think in November, I'll probably just buy whatever Playstation is available and call it quits for chasing after PC games unless they run on my existing, obsolete junk laptop. It'll probably be cheaper than playing the upgrade game.Spunjji - Tuesday, January 7, 2020 - link
From a value-for-money perspective, it's hard to beat a brand-new console.