A report from Igor Wallossek at Igor's Lab claims that the Radeon RX 5600 XT will land in the third week of January 2020. The German publication also reveals the potential specifications for AMD's looming Navi-powered graphics card.
Wallossek's sources hinted that AMD could be rewarming the Navi 10 silicon, which is inside the Radeon RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT, for the Radeon RX 5600 XT. Obviously, the chipmaker would need to cut down the die to prevent any product cannibalism.
The Navi 10 die houses two Shader Engines (SEs), and there are two Asynchronous Compute Engines (ACEs) inside each Shader Engine. According to Igor's Lab, it's possible to disable one of the four ACEs, which effectively deactivate 1/4th of the Navi 10 silicon.
As a quick reminder, a fully unlocked Navi 10 die features 40 RDNA (Radeon DNA) Compute Units (CUs), which comes down to a total of 2,560 Stream Processors (SPs), 160 texture mapping units (TMUs) and 64 render output units (ROPs).
Assuming that AMD goes down this route, the Radeon RX 5600 XT is likely to have 30 RDNA CUs, 1,920 SPs, 120 TMUs, 48 ROPs and 3MB of L2 cache. Theoretically, the Radeon RX 5600 XT can perform up to 75% of a Radeon RX 5700 XT at the same clock speeds. Therefore, the Radeon RX 5600 XT can be a replacement for the dated Radeon RX Vega 56 at best.
The Radeon RX 5600 XT reportedly comes in 6GB and 8GB GDDR6 flavors. Disabling an ACE also means cutting off one of the memory controllers. As a result, the Radeon RX 5600 XT is limited to a 192-bit memory interface so the memory choices seem reasonable. Technically, AMD could put up to 12GB of GDDR6 memory into the Radeon RX 5600 XT if the chipmaker desires. At any rate, the 6GB variant would be a hard sell considering that the lower-tier Radeon RX 5500 XT is available with 8GB of GDDR6 memory.
