AMD Beige Goby Radeon Navi 24 RDNA 2 GPU Poised For Entry-Level Status
It seems that yet another Navi GPU is on the horizon, one that is codenamed Beige Goby. A reference to Beige Coby can be found in the driver code of a new open-source Linux driver, and it adds to a growing list of fish-themed codenames for GPUs based on AMD's second generation Radeon DNA (RDNA 2) graphics architecture.
This most likely refers to Navi 24, which has not yet been released or even announced. Same goes with Navi 23, otherwise known by its codenamed Dimgrey Cavefish. Then there is Navi 22 (Navy Flounder) and Navi 21 (Sienna Cichlid), both of which have been released as part of the Radeon RX 6000 series. Specifically, here's how it breaks down...
- Radeon RX 6900 XT: Navi 21 XTX with 5,120 stream processors
- Radeon RX 6800 XT: Navi 21 XT with 4,608 stream processors
- Radeon RX 6800: Navi 21 XL with 3,840 stream processors
- Radeon RX 6700 XT: Navi 22 XT with 2,560 stream processors
Navi 23 is expected to power AMD's mid-range cards, possibly the Radeon RX 6600 series, which would relegate Navi 24 (Beige Goby) to the Radeon RX 6500 or Radeon RX 6400 series in the more affordable entry-level discrete GPU space. But is all speculation at this point, until AMD gets around to announcing a fleshed out Radeon RX 6000 series lineup.
Unfortunately, the Linux patch referencing Beige Goby does not provide many details, other than to reveal the fishy codename. However, a leaker on Twitter seems to believe it has a single System Direct Memory Access (SDMA) engine rather than two like most discrete GPUs.
It's also believed that Navi 24 sports 16MB of Infinity Cache, 1MB of L2 cache, and 16 compute units, resulting in 1,024 stream processors. We're probably looking at a paltry 64-bit memory bus as well, with perhaps just 4GB of GDDR6 memory.
If it actually works out that way, then the Radeon RX 6500/6400 or whatever it ends up being called is not going to be a huge upgrade over integrated graphics, though it should still offer better performance overall. Just temper your expectations—you won't be gaming at 4K on Navi 24, and depending on the title, maybe not 1440p either.
