AMD Radeon RX 7000 Series graphics cards will not feature the new 12VHPWR power connector. This has been confirmed by Scott Herkelman (SVP & GM of AMD Radeon), who was prompted to take to Twitter today after HardOCP’s Kyle Bennett revealed that he had spoken to various sources and learned that Navi 31 reference cards, including custom models, aren’t adopting the new 16-pin connector that NVIDIA has moved to for its newer GPUs, such as the flagship GeForce RTX 4090. “The Radeon RX 6000 series and upcoming RDNA 3 GPUs will not use this power connector,” Herkelman confirmed.
The Radeon RX 6000 series and upcoming RDNA 3 GPUs will not use this power connector.
— Scott Herkelman (@sherkelman) October 25, 2022
Angstronomics teased this back in August as part of an RDNA 3 graphics article, a portion of which mentions “dual 8-pin connectors”:
The world’s first chiplet GPU, Navi31 makes use of TSMC’s fanout technology (InFO_oS) to lower costs, surrounding a central 48 WGP Graphics Chiplet Die (GCD) with 6 Memory Chiplet Dies (MCD), each containing 16MB of Infinity Cache and the GDDR6 controllers with 64-bit wide PHYs. The organic fanout layer has a 35-micron bump pitch, the densest available in the industry. There is a 3D stacked MCD also being productized (1-hi) using TSMC’s SoIC. While this doubles the Infinity Cache available, the performance benefit is limited given the cost increase. Thus, the main Navi31 SKU will have 96MB of Infinity Cache (0-hi). This is lower than the 128MB in Navi21. A cut-down SKU will offer 42 WGP and 5x MCD (80MB Cache, 320-bit GDDR6).
The reference card appears to have an updated 3-fan design that is slightly taller than the previous generation, with a distinctive 3 red stripe accent on a section of the heatsink fins near the dual 8-pin connectors.