Info Rumors allege AMD Shipped "Unfinished RDNA 3 Navi 31 A0 GPU" Silicon In Radeon RX 7900 Series ! ?

Hi,

Just saw this article on WCCFTECH. If this rumor/leak is true, then it's kind of strange. Anyway, full credit goes to the author. I will just copy the main points here, since this is not my own text.

As discovered by Kepler_L2, it looks like early RDNA 3 silicon had a non-working shader prefetch HW. This was featured in three chips, the GFX1100 (Navi 31), GFX1102 (Navi 33), & GFX1103 (the APU lineup consisting of Phoenix chips). Now based on the latest GitHub submission.

Kepler is also suggesting that Navi 32 GPUs are actually based on the 'GFX1103' IP whereas Navi 33 chips feature the 'GFX1102' IP. The same issues are found on every other chip besides Navi 32 which is going to be featured in several mainstream discrete GPUs on desktop and mobility platforms by early 2023.

According to Kepler, this is something that cannot be fixed or revised in a few weeks and will take several months if AMD even plans on fixing this. It would be a major blow if newer silicon with a fix comes out a few months later because the majority of gamers would already have bought the early revision of the Radeon RX 7900 series with the unfinished silicon.

But that's not all, other major features such as the VOPD instructions featured on the RDNA 3 GPUs claimed to offer a big improvement in performance but in reality, they only managed to deliver a 4 percent improvement over RDNA 2 in ray tracing titles.

The RDNA 3 silicon was designed to handle dual Wave32 instructions for twice the floating point performance by utilizing 64 multi-precision & multi-purpose ALUs implemented across 2 SIMD32 units. Talking to an AMD representative, folks over at HardwareTimes were able to confirm that AMD is currently in the process of fine-tuning the performance here and expects optimizations along the way:

What's likely is that AMD may prepare a refresh a year later that would address these issues but for now, the Radeon RX 7900 series may have to depend massively on driver-level optimizations to address the unfinished GPU nature of their top RDNA 3 silicon.

Reviewers who have also managed to take a first look at various custom AMD Radeon RX 7900 series graphics cards have also reported inconsistent and fluctuating clock speeds on the cards. AMD had also promised up to +54% improvement in power efficiency but that was no where to be seen and the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture blew away RDNA 3 GPUs in all power efficiency metrics on review day.


View: https://twitter.com/Kepler_L2/status/1603146626067046401

Rumors Allege AMD Shipped Unfinished RDNA 3 Navi 31 A0 GPU Silicon In Radeon RX 7900 Series (wccftech.com)
 
Well, there is actually a rumor floating in the Chinese board forums, via Weibo, that AMD may recall some of the unsold SKUs back from retailers/distributors, and re-release them with the new revised silicon ?

But this doesn't make any sense, and I don't think this rumor is true. Is it possible though ?

EDIT:

It appears that this decision from MSI to delay the release of their own cards might have something to do with this rumor.

MSI confirmed to Andreas Schilling (HardwareLuxx) that there are Radeon RX 7900 cards coming, except they are not launching until Q1 2023. Also no reference (MBA – Made by AMD) designs are planned.


View: https://twitter.com/aschilling/status/1603671191914483712
 
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