Code Snippet Appears To Confirm Navi 31’s Existence?

It’s becoming a recurring trend in the tech world at the moment to find out snippets of information concerning products far away from release. We haven’t even seen the release of AMD’s Navi 21 graphics card yet, but it seems we already have proof of an upcoming Navi 31 graphics card – although not officially.

AMD’s Navi 21 is expected to land at some point this year and is set to be a pretty impressive piece of kit. We’re going to assume that this Navi 31 GPU will act as a successor to Navi 21, so it makes sense that work has already started.

Where Did This Confirmation Come From?

The upcoming Navi 31 GPU looks to have been confirmed by the code for MacOS 11 Sur Beta. This comes from _rogame via Hardware Leaks and has been spotted through references in Apple’s AMD driver code.

In the past, once chips have been noticed in AMD’s drivers it has usually meant that they are quite far along in the development cycle. This makes it pretty surprising that we’re seeing Navi 31 confirmations so early.

The drivers in question relate to AMD’s macOS11 Big Sur which is a continuation of Apple’s operating system. This is set to be the first major version change in over 15 years and will mark the jump to version 11. This leak also suggests that Apple has plans to move to its own ARM-based silicon rather than using Intel/AMD parts, although this isn’t confirmed.

We can see from the images below that Navi 31 isn’t merely mentioned in passing. It appears frequently throughout the driver code.

What Else Can We Learn From This Code?

We can also catch a glimpse of both the upcoming Navi 22 and Navi 23 in the driver’s code. This takes shape as support for PCI IDs which usually means the silicon has cleared the final validation stage. These are as follows:

  • 0x73A0 (Navi22)
  • 0x73A2 (Navi22)
  • 0x73A3 (Navi22)
  • 0x73AB (Navi22)
  • 0x73AE (Navi22)
  • 0x73BF (Navi23) twice counted

There is also mention of AMD Cezanne in the code, this is AMD’s upcoming APU which features the RDNA2 and Zen 3 architecture.

These APUs are expected to compete against Intel’s Tiger Lake processors and will act as a significant successor over the existing Renoir lineup. The Cezanne lineup will be split into two segments, the low-power Cezanne-U and the high-performance Cezanne-H processors.

It’s great news to hear that AMD is still going full steam ahead in its aim to create great products while still keeping costs low. We’ll have to wait to see if this will have an effect on how their competition prices their products though.