AMD Navi 23 coming in April -- and firm says nope to hash rate limiter

Posted on Friday, March 19 2021 @ 9:19 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
AMD logo
AMD just rolled out the Radeon RX 6700 XT and it looks like we may get another new model in April. Citing known Twitter leaker KittyYYuko, VideoCardz reports we may soon see the arrival of "Dimgrey Cavefish" GPUs. This is the codename for Navi23, a mainstream GPU internded for Full HD gaming.

Navi23 is expected to feature up to 32 compute units (CUs), up to 2048 streaming processors, a 128-bit memory bus, and up to 8GB GDDR6 memory.

The chip will be used for either the Radeon RX 6600 or RX 6500 series. VideoCardz expects it will be the latter because earlier leaks pointed to a 192-bit memory bus for the Radeon RX 6600 XT.

According to KittyYYuko, the video card has a target price of 2,499 yuan. This translates to around US$384.

AMD says nope to crypto hash rate limiter

Ever since NVIDIA introduced its anti-cryptocurrency mining protection on the GeForce RTX 3060, people wondered whether AMD would do the same. NVIDIA's goal here was to get more GeForce cards in the hands of gamers, by making new models less attractive to miners. It's a move that was generally received positively among gamers, although there was some criticism that NVIDIA shouldn't decide what a user does with his or her card.

AMD follows the latter line of thinking. At a digital press event, AMD product manager Nish Neelalojanan said the firm has no intention to limit cryptocurrency mining on its Radeon RX video cards. Neelalojanan explained AMD will not be blocking specific workloads, but he pointed out that from an architectural point of view, RDNA2 is less attractive to mining because it's more tuned to gaming:
"That said, there are a couple of things. First of all, RDNA was designed from the ground up for gaming and RDNA 2 doubles up on this. And what I mean by this is, Infinity Cache and a smaller bus width were carefully chosen to hit a very specific gaming hit rate. However, mining specifically enjoys, or scales with, higher bandwidth and bus width so there are going to be limitations from an architectural level for mining itself." -- Neelalojanan
NVIDIA's mining limiter took a big hit last week as the firm accidentally released a developer driver with code that circumvents the protection. PC Gamer believes that even if AMD wanted to implement a hash rate limiter, it would be hard for the company because the firm's Linux drivers are all open-source. NVIDIA's drivers are all closed source.


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



Loading Comments