AMD is not going to utilize the Gen5 16-pin "12VHPWR" connectors for its Radeon RX 7000 "RDNA 3" GPUs, as reports Kyle Bennett.
AMD Goes The Safer Route, Drops Gen5 16-Pin Connector Plans For Their Radeon RX 7000 "RDNA 3" GPUs
Update: AMD has officially confirmed that they won't be using 16-pin connectors on their upcoming RDNA 3 "Radeon RX 7000" GPUs.
The Radeon RX 6000 series and upcoming RDNA 3 GPUs will not use this power connector.
— Scott Herkelman (@sherkelman) October 25, 2022
HardOCP's chief and ex-Intel employee, Kyle Bennett, reports that he has confirmed through multiple sources that AMD won't be using the Gen5 16-pin "12VHPWR" connector on its Radeon RX 7000 "RDNA 3" GPU lineup which is expected to make debut next week. The following was tweeted by Kyle:
After the @NVIDIAGeForce melting drama, I have verified through multiple sources that @Radeon Navi 31 ref cards will NOT use the 12VHPWR power adapter, and I could not verify any AIBs using 12VHPWR on N31 either. Picture in case you don't know what a smoked 12VHPWR looks like.
After the @NVIDIAGeForce melting drama, I have verified through multiple sources that @Radeon Navi 31 ref cards will NOT use the 12VHPWR power adapter, and I could not verify any AIBs using 12VHPWR on N31 either. Picture in case you don't know what a smoked 12VHPWR looks like. pic.twitter.com/hLWhjqSm4v
— Kyle Bennett (@KyleBennett) October 25, 2022
Just a few hours ago, two cases of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards burning up have been reported and the root cause of it so far has been blamed to be the 16-pin connector. The issue may be related to several factors with most saying it's the bends that cause the cables to overheat these connector plugs. It was already reported that AMD would go the more conventional route & utilize standard 8-pin plugs and this is further confirmation of that. Furthermore, we also verified with a few AIBs that AMD is indeed not going to feature 16-pin connectors on their cards.
A recent PCB leak also showed that AIBs were using up to three 8-pin connectors for Radeon RX 7000 custom designs. That further cements the use of standard 8-pin connectors over 16-pin plugs on the RDNA 3 lineup.
AMD has already said that their power figures will be much lower than the competition with the RDNA 3 "Radeon RX 7000" GPU lineup. However, at the same time, the power consumption will remain a bit higher than the existing RDNA 2 GPUs as mentioned below.
reference's TBP is amazing.
— Greymon55 (@greymon55) October 19, 2022
“It's really the fundamentals of physics that are driving this,” Naffziger explained. "The demand for gaming and compute performance is, if anything, just accelerating, and at the same time, the underlying process technology is slowing down pretty dramatically — and the improvement rate. So the power levels are just going to keep going up. Now, we've got a multi-year roadmap of very significant efficiency improvements to offset that curve, but the trend is there.”
"Performance is king," stated Naffziger, "but even if our designs are more power-efficient, that doesn't mean you don't push power levels up if the competition is doing the same thing. It's just that they'll have to push them a lot higher than we will."
Sam Naggziger (AMD's SVP & Product Technology Architect) via Tomshardware
AMD confirmed that its RDNA 3 GPUs will be coming later this year with a huge performance uplift. The company's Senior Vice President of Engineering, Radeon Technologies Group, David Wang, said that the next-gen GPUs for Radeon RX 7000 series will offer over 50% performance per watt uplift vs the existing RDNA 2 GPUs. Some of the key features of the RDNA 3 GPUs highlighted by AMD will include:
- 5nm Process Node
- Advanced Chiplet Packaging
- Rearchitected Compute Unit
- Optimized Graphics Pipeline
- Next-Gen AMD Infinity Cache
- Enhanced Ray Tracing Capabilities
- Refined Adaptive Power Management
- >50% Perf/Watt vs RDNA 2
AMD will be unveiling its RDNA 3 GPU architecture and the Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards on the 3rd of November. They have a full Livestream planned which you can read more details about here.
