Alleged specifications for AMD’s upcoming mid-budget Navi GPU, RX 3080, have leaked courtesy of KOMACHI. According to his now-removed tweet, the card offers 2560 stream processors (40 compute units, with 64 stream processors in each) and a 256-bit memory interface. It also features eight shader engines.
As Wccftech points out, that last detail could imply AMD’s future cards will scale better, as previous implementations of the microarchitecture tapped out at four per die, limiting the utilization of stream processors. Current AMD GPUs have no more than 4096, but that could very well change.
…the number of shader engines in Navi is actually a significant detail because one of the major architectural limitations of AMD’s previous GCN implementations is the inability to scale the microarchitecture beyond 4 shader engines per die. This has led to underutilization of stream processors in the company’s bigger GPUs such as Fiji and Vega and has long been a known limitation of GCN that the company was working to develop solutions to.