AMD: no blower reference fans for next-gen Radeon graphics cards

AMD revealed more details about its next-gen RDNA 2 architecture during its recent Financial Analyst Day, where we now (unfortunately) need to call "Big Navi" something else: RDNA 2, or Navi 2X.

The next-gen RDNA 2-based Radeon RX reference graphics cards from AMD have been confirmed to not use blower-style designs, with ex-NVIDIA and now current Vice President and General Manager for Radeon, Scott Herkelman, explaining that "there will be no blower reference fans for gamers on next gen".

AMD will however, not be stopping AIB partners from making blower design coolers on their cards if they so wish -- but AMD has been listening to feedback in a big way. Herkelman added: "Our AIBs may choose to do a "blower" design on any of the next gen GPUs, however, the majority of feedback we received from the community at the launch of 5700 XT on AMD reference designs has guided us towards dual/tri-axial designs. I'm excited for you all to see them when the time is right!"

AMD RDNA 2 / Navi 2X / Big Navi Specs

• Optimized 7nm+ node (kinda confirmed)
• RDNA 2 architecture (confirmed)
• 80 compute units
• 5120 stream processors
• 17.5 TFLOPs compute performance
• Hardware ray tracing support (confirmed)

NVIDIA is currently cooking its next-gen Ampere GPU architecture, something that will power the GeForce RTX 3080 and GeForce RTX 3070 that were recently teased. These cards have a huge 10/20GB of GDDR6 on the higher-end SKUs, while rumor has it the lower-end cards will have 8/16GB GDDR6.

Check out these monster specs:

GA103 (GeForce RTX 3080)

• 10/20GB GDDR6
• 320-bit memory interface
• 60 SMs
• 3480 CUDA cores

GA104 (GeForce RTX 3070)

• 8/16GB GDDR6
• 256-bit memory interface
• 48 SMs
• 3072 CUDA cores