Leak suggests AMD's Radeon RX 7900M mobile GPU could launch on October 19 with 72 CUs and 16 GB VRAM

WCCFTech reports that AMD is expected to launch a top-of-the-line mobile RDNA3 GPU later this month. The existing Radeon RX 7600M/S models do not seem to be too popular among laptop integrators since their performance is lacking in comparison to the Nvidia RTX 4060 solutions, so Team Red is now looking to jump straight to the RX 7900M models and skip the 7800M for the time being.

The Radeon RX 7900M models are rumored to launch together with the Threadripper PRO 7000 processors on October 19. According to WCCFTech, the RX 7900M SKU would feature 72 compute units with 4608 stream processors, suggesting that it may be based on the Navi 31 dies rather than the Navi 32 that gets a maximum of 60 CUs. Nevertheless, 72 CUs is still ~25% less compared to the full Navi 31 dies on the desktop-grade 7900 XTX. This reduction is needed to keep the TGP in the 175 W zone, matching the RTX 4090 mobile version. Apparently the 7900M can go up to 200 W, but that would drastically impact the battery life.

The memory bus size would also see a reduction to 256 bit, so the VRAM configurations would support 16 GB instead of 20 or 24 GB as seen on the desktop models. Again, a sacrifice that needs to be done in order to limit the TGP, but 16 GB is in line with what Nvidia is offering on the RTX 4090, anyway.

Laptop integrators will most likely be incentivised to offer all-AMD configurations with very competitive prices compared to Intel+Nvidia models, so sub US$2,000 prices for an R9 7940HS + RX 7900M are possible. The problem is these AMD Advantage editions tend to be produced in significantly lower volumes, as OEMs do not want to lose the incentives from Intel and Nvidia. Hopefully, AMD could also fix the initial supply issues this time around.

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