AMD hints laptops powered by Radeon RX 6000 mobile GPUs will be coming soon, Navi 22 Radeon RX 6700M to offer 32 CUs, 90-135 W TGP, and likely 12 GB VRAM

AMD announced the latest entrant into the RDNA2 family yesterday, the Radeon RX 6700 XT. While AMD's latest architecture is finally competitive with NVIDIA's offerings across the whole lineup, at least in raster performance, Team Red seemed to be conspicuously quiet on RDNA2 mobile. However, that may change soon.

During the RX 6700 XT announcement, CVP and GM of AMD Radeon, Scott Herkelman, hinted that RDNA2 is indeed coming to laptops. One of the slides in the presentation showed what looks like an MSI Bravo laptop and indicated that RX 6000 series laptops are coming soon. For those not aware, the MSI Bravo 15 was powered by a Radeon RX 5300M while the Bravo 17 featured an RX 5500M.

Though AMD announced the Ryzen 5000 Zen 3 mobile APUs at CES, it did not have any Radeon mobile offerings to show. All Ryzen 5000-powered laptops were equipped with NVIDIA Ampere Laptop GPUs, which brought fresh conundrums with respect to how clocks and TGPs were determined.

AMD's previous generation Radeon RX mobile GPUs didn't really feature in as many notebooks as we had hoped. The top-end Radeon RX 5700M was only available in one laptop, the Alienware Area-51m R2. The RX 5600M, which had performance equivalent to the RTX 2060 Mobile, was only seen in the MSI Alpha 17 and Dell G5 15 SE 5505. In the Apple camp, the MacBook Pro 16 offered Radeon Pro 5300M, Radeon Pro 5500M, and Radeon Pro 5600M dGPU options.

At the moment, not much is known about what the upcoming Radeon RX 6000 mobile GPUs stand to offer. So far, we expect Navi 22 to feature in the Radeon RX 6700M with 32 compute units (CUs) or 2,304 cores with a TDP ranging between 90 and 135 W. A Radeon RX 6600M with 28 CUs (1,792 cores) and a 50-100 W TDP is also in the offing.

Known leaker Patrick Schur earlier indicated of a possible Navi 22 XT variant with a 146 W TDP and a 192-bit memory bus, which likely means it will have 12 GB of GDDR6 VRAM while the Navi 22 XL SKUs may offer a 160-bit bus with 10 GB VRAM. Apart from these, AMD may also offer a higher Navi 21 mobile RX 6800M and sub-100 W Navi 23 and Navi 24 SKUs.

There's no tentative launch date for the RX 6000 mobile series at the moment, but we may see RDNA2 mobile GPUs launch alongside Tiger Lake-H some time in Q2 this year. Hopefully, we will get to see even more laptops with Radeon RX 6000 mobile and that there will be less confusion with respect to the actual performance that can be expected from these GPUs.

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