AMD officially launched the Radeon RX 9070 XT and Radeon RX 9070 yesterday, built on the new generation RDNA 4 architecture and supporting AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 4 (FSR 4) technology. Both new graphics cards feature the Navi 48 chip paired with 16GB of GDDR6 memory.
Prior to the official release, rumors suggested that the Navi 48 chip contained 53.9 billion transistors with an approximate die size of 350mm², smaller than the previously rumored 390mm². According to AMD's final specifications, the actual die size is slightly larger at 357mm², while the transistor count matches the rumors exactly.
This means the Navi 48 die is smaller than NVIDIA's AD103 (378.6mm²) and GB203 (378mm²), yet features significantly higher transistor density. Navi 48 achieves a transistor density of 150MTr/mm² compared to AD103 and GB203's 121.2MTr/mm² and 120.6MTr/mm² respectively. AMD's transistor density exceeds NVIDIA's current Blackwell architecture GPUs by approximately 25%, making it potentially one of the highest density GPUs manufactured to date. Considering AMD and NVIDIA use similar manufacturing processes, this difference exceeds many industry expectations.
NVIDIA appears less focused on transistor density with its current generation products, with the Blackwell architecture actually featuring slightly lower density than the previous Ada Lovelace architecture. It should be noted that since transistor counts are often approximations and can be calculated using different methodologies, the actual density gap may not be quite as pronounced as these official specifications suggest.
Comparing RDNA 4's transistor density improvements to RDNA 3 presents some challenges and may not offer a fair comparison. RDNA 3 utilized a multi-chip design with MCM packaging, with Graphics Compute Dies (GCD) and Memory Cache Dies (MCD) manufactured on 5nm and 6nm processes respectively. This return to a monolithic chip design with RDNA 4 appears to have come without sacrifices to density or efficiency. Combined with architectural and technical improvements, AMD's new graphics architecture shows promising potential.
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