AMD’S RADEON 6600 XT LAUNCHED

AMD’s releases schedule just keeps rolling

THERE’S ALWAYS SOMETHING cooking at AMD, and this month it’s the launch of the Radeon RX 6600 XT. At $379, this midrange RDNA2 card costs $100 less than the 6700 XT and is aimed at 1080p gaming. It looks expensive compared with the RTX 3060, which starts at $329, however, you won’t find a 3060 at anywhere near that price at the moment.

Inside the 6600 XT is the new Navi 23 GPU with 2,048 stream processor, and 32 compute units running at a base clock of 1,968MHz, and a 2,359MHz boost. The GPU is significantly smaller than the Navi 22, which means more chips per wafer. That’s good news for supplies, as small chips mean more chips. There’s 8GB of GDDR6 and 32MB of L3 ‘Infinity’ cache, quite a drop from the 6700’s 96MB, but again, it helps with supply issues.

With the graphics card market in a strange place, AMD has concentrated on volume, and the result is an expensive 1080p card that’s about 15 percent faster than the 3060. Unusually, there is no AMD reference design, but while the design may be a compromise, it should actually be available. We’ll find out just how good it is next month.

AMD has just had a record-breaking second quarter, with year-on-year revenue jumping 99 percent. AMD’s CEO, Lisa Su, claims it “remains on track to launch next-generation products in 2022”. This means 5nm Zen 4 processors, RDNA 3 GPUs, and Ryzen 6000 series processors. We can also expect an assault on gaming and the high-end laptop market. With the first Ryzen only appearing in 2017, five generations in four years is a truly hectic pace. Long may it

continue.