AMD Mobile GPU 2022 Update: Radeon 6000S Series, 6x50M Parts, and Navi 24-Based 6500M

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As part of a jam-packed CES keynote presentation this morning, AMD has announced a slew of updates to its mobile graphics lineup. Altogether, AMD is introducing one new GPU and 8 new SKUs this morning, almost quadrupling the size of their mobile graphics parts catalog. Combined with the Ryzen 6000 Mobile series announcement, it’s clear that this year AMD is going to be heavily focusing on laptops, and that is going for both their CPU(APU) and GPU businesses.

Radeon RX 6000S Series: Slimming Down For 1080pGetting right to the heart of matters, the marquee announcement for mobile graphics out of AMD this morning is the announcement of a new sub-series of mobile parts, the Radeon RX 6600S series. These new parts are based on AMD’s existing Navi 2x GPUs – specifically Navi 23, it would seem – with AMD taking a particular interest in thin and light laptop designs. Indeed, even the name alludes to this, with the S standing for “slim”.

According to AMD, the Radeon RX 6000S series is designed for use in sub-4.5 pound notebooks that are also under 20mm thick. This is a laptop range that AMD can already serve today with the likes of the Radeon RX 6600M, but it’s also something where they want to do better. Specifically, AMD wants to better optimize the power efficiency of their chips (and the laptops driving them) to allow for better performance in these styles of thin and light laptops. To do this, AMD is implementing some new power efficiency boosting technologies, though at least ahead of CES the company isn’t disclosing anything more about what those technologies are.

More fundamentally however, while AMD isn’t going as far as to explicitly say it, the 6000S series seems to be their answer (or at least analogue) to NVIDIA’s popular GeForce Max-Q Design parts. By binning their most power efficient chips and creating additional design rules around them, NVIDIA and its partners have been able to put together a whole category of thin and light laptops that, while TDP constrained, still offer solid performance – and which can be sold at a greater margin over laptops with higher TDP parts. So with the market for this style of thin and light laptops growing at nearly 3x the rate of the overall gaming laptop market, it makes a lot of sense for AMD to get a finger or two in it as well.

That said, AMD’s ambitions are a bit narrower/more focused than NVIDIA’s high efficiency parts. For starters, AMD is focusing on just 1080p gaming here. All 3 of the 6000S series parts – 6800S, 67800S, and 6600S – will be promoted on the basis of their 1080p gaming performance. Either being able to put out 100fps (or better) with max quality graphics at the high end, hitting the same framerates at high quality settings for the mid-end part, or still hitting 80fps at high quality graphics at the low end.

And since 1080p has been the domain of Navi 23, it’s none too surprising to see that AMD is apparently using that GPU for all three SKUs here. What we’re essentially looking at is a sub-stack of parts where clockspeeds and TDPs increase as you get higher into the stack. This limits the performance of the series to whatever a top Navi 23 configuration can do, but I can only imagine that it helps to simplify the design side of matters for AMD’s partners; no matter the SKU, it’s still the same physical chip and memory configuration.

All told then, we’re looking at three parts. The 6800S has a reference TGP of 100W, and while we’re waiting on AMD to officially disclose the CU count and clockspeeds, I expect it will be at or close to 32 CUs (Navi 23’s native configuration) with perhaps slightly more modest clockspeeds than what we’ve seen on the top 6600M laptops. Notably, this does mean that there’s a bit of fracturing here in terms of names versus the GPU used; whereas 6800M is a Navi 22 chip, 6800S will be a Navi 23 chip.

This is followed by the Radeon RX 6700S and 6600S. We’re waiting on the full details of these parts as well, but AMD’s reference TGPs are 80W and 65W respectively. So we’re expecting them to have lower clockspeeds and possibly fewer CUs in line with those power limits.

We’re also waiting on confirmation from AMD on memory clockspeeds. But given the premium nature of the lineup, we’re expecting some (if not all) of these parts to get 16Gbps GDDR6 in order to ensure that they’re kept well-fed.

Past that, these new SKUs are based on the same Navi 23/RDNA2 architecture we all know and love. So there are no new end-user features to speak of, or other relevant high-level specification changes. And surprisingly, even with the focus on thin and light laptops, according to AMD the chip packaging hasn’t been changed for the 6000S series; so AMD isn’t doing anything to further reduce the Z-height of their chips.

Laptops with Radeon RX 6000S Series parts will begin shipping this quarter.

Radeon RX 6x50M Series: Additional Mobile SKUs With More Performance

The second group of mobile graphics announcements coming out of AMD involve the addition of 3 more Radeon RX 6800M/6600M SKUs. At just over 6 months since they initially introduced their current-generation mobile parts, AMD is expanding the family with some additional SKUs based on their existing Navi 22 and Navi 23 GPUs. These new parts all carry a 50-class designation, and are essentially higher-clocked/higher-configured versions of their existing mobile counterparts.

Starting at the top, we have AMD’s new flagship Radeon mobile part, the Radeon RX 6850M XT. This is a 6800M that has been clocked another 7% higher, raising its game clock from 2300MHz to 2460MHz. As the 6800M was already a fully-enabled Navi 22 part, there are no other meaningful changes to speak of here; it’s still 40 CUs and paired with 16Gbps GDDR6 on a 192-bit memory bus.The other two 6x50M parts are part of the 6600M family. These are the Radeon RX 6650M and 6650M XT. Both of these are enhanced versions of the original 6600M, based around the same Navi 23 chip, but with better specifications.
We’re still waiting on AMD to announce the official clockspeeds and CU configurations here, but at a minimum, both parts are getting faster memory clocks. Whereas the original 6600M shipped with 14Gbps memory, the 6650M parts get 16Gbps memory, which amounts to a 14% increase in memory bandwidth. AMD has not published much in the way of performance figures here, but in the case of the 6650M they are touting performance 20% better than the 6600M.

Memory speed increases alone aren’t enough to account for this, so the 6650M XT is also getting some kind of GPU clockspeed or CU count increase to unlock further performance from the Navi 23 GPU.

Otherwise, these new parts are exactly what they say on the tin: new SKUs based on and designed to fit into AMD’s existing Radeon RX 6000M series lineup. So there are no other configuration or feature changes to speak of.

Like the new Radeon RX 6000S series, the RX 6x50M parts are expected to become available in laptops in the first quarter of this year.
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