AMD confirms that the RX 6500 XT was designed for notebooks

The entry-level AMD Radeon RX 6500 XT graphics card and Navi 24 GPU have received a lot of criticism for their rather flawed specs. Apparently, it seems that the company originally planned to make it an entry-level GPU for notebooks or OEMs not exactly aimed at gamers. The information, reported by colleagues at VideoCardz, originates from a post written by an AMD employee on the Phoronix forums.

“The primary use of Navi24 will be in laptops paired with a Rembrandt APU, which has full video functionality and [PCIe Gen4] "- said John Bridgman, Principal Member of Technical Staff at AMD and responsible for Linux drivers -" My impression was that it was only the encoding that was limited in Navi 24, not the decoding - again I'm not sure if this limitation is real or just a typo on the product page. I'm trying to come up with a definitive answer. ”

Officially, AMD says it has slashed its Radeon RX 6500 XT severely to make it unattractive to miners and to some extent scalpers. Still, its 64-bit memory bus and 4GB of memory can limit performance in games, and as a result even gamers may not get the boost to purchase it (net of the current shortage). Furthermore, the lack of support for AV1 decoding makes the GPU rather uninteresting even for multimedia users. The company explained that since “over half of Radeon Pro users only use one monitor,” it has eliminated two of the four RDNA 2 display pipelines from its Navi 24 graphics processor. That's why the Radeon Pro W6400, along with all the others. derived from Navi 24 (such as the Radeon RX 6500 XT), it offers only two connectors for displays.

Photo Credit: AMD if (jQuery ("# ​​crm_srl-th_hardware_d_mh2_1"). is (": visible")) {console.log ("Edinet ADV adding zone: tag crm_srl-th_hardware_d_mh2_1 slot id: th_hardware_d_mh2" ); } It appears that AMD originally positioned its Navi 24 as a dedicated notebook GPU based on its 'Rembrandt' next generation Ryzen 6000 series APU, which already has a decent multimedia engine and additional display pipeline. While the Radeon RX 6500 XT in its desktop form with a 107W TBP is too hot for laptops, a fully enabled Navi 24 could be a good notebook GPU (even for basic gaming) when running at lower frequencies and coupled with the upcoming APU.

But there is also a problem with Navi 24's positioning as a laptop GPU. Firstly, it will take some time for AMD's Ryzen 6000 series to roll out, so there will be dozens of machines based on the Ryzen 5000 series with Navi 24. Keeping in mind that AMD's Ryzen 5000 only supports PCIe 3.0, this will be a limit for games. Finally, given that AMD Ryzen 5000 now has an obsolete multimedia engine dating back to 2016, notebooks equipped with these APUs and the Navi 24 GPU will have rather outdated multimedia playback capabilities.