RDNA 2 comes to laptops: AMD unleashes its answer to RTX 3080, 3070

After unveiling its first RDNA 2-based GPU last year, AMD has finally brought the technology to laptops. The company announced three new Radeon RX 6000M mobile GPUs at the ongoing Computex 2021—Radeon RX 6600M, RX 6700M, and RX 6800M. In this post, we will be looking at what these new AMD Radeon RX 6000M mobile GPUs have to offer.

AMD Radeon RX 6000M mobile GPUs:

As mentioned earlier, the Radeon RX 6000M mobile GPUs are based on RDNA 2 microarchitecture that brings multiple cool features, such as Infinity Cache, hardware-accelerated Ray Tracing, Smart Access Memory (SAM), and more. In addition, the company has invested heavily in making RDNA 2 more power-efficient. The architecture is scalable, meaning you one use it for lower power models, higher performance machines, and even power-constrained gaming laptops. Thus, after all these years, AMD has its best chance to win the laptop GPU market with the new Radeon RX 6000M GPUs.

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Also, the SmartShift feature that we saw in last year’s Dell G5 15 SE will be available to other manufacturers as well. This feature dynamically shifts the power between the GPU and CPU. What it means is that the system can pour more power on the CPU than on GPU during CPU-bound tasks and vice versa.

Radeon RX 6800M

Here, the Radeon RX 6800M is the flagship of the bunch. Despite the name, it is based on Navi 22 GPU, which is on the Radeon RX 6700 XT. Both feature 40 compute units and an equal number of ray accelerators. Similarly, they have 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM and 96MB Infinity Cache. RX 6800M has a game clock speed of up to 2300MHz. AMD even claims that it will outperform RTX 3070 (145W) and in some cases, even RTX 3080 (145W), when it comes to modern AAA titles. It is important to note that these NVIDIA cards were compared against RX 6800M, whose TGP starts at 145W.

Radeon RX 6700M, 6600M

On the other hand, Radeon RX 6700M and RX 6600M feature 36 and 28 compute units, respectively. The 6700M has 10GB of GDDR6 VRAM, 80MB Infinity Cache, and a 160-bit memory interface. The TGP for this GPU can be anywhere between 80 to 135W. Similarly, the RX 6600M has 8GB of GDDR6 VRAM, 32MB Infinity cache, and a 128-bit wide memory lane. It can be configured from 50 – 100W. AMD says that we can expect up to 100fps while playing “popular games” on 1440p. On the other hand, RX 6600M is for “epic 1080p gaming”. However, given the wide range of configurable TGP, these claims may not always hold true.

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AMD Radeon RX 6000M series GPU Specifications:

AMD Advantage Design Framework

AMD also announced its latest design framework that it calls "AMD Advantage". While these new AMD GPUs boast a ton of features, it is always up to laptop manufacturers whether to leverage them or not. This is where the AMD Advantage comes into play. An AMD Advantage laptop will feature the combo of Ryzen 5000 APU and RX 6000M GPU. In addition, it will also ensure the following characteristics:

• Smart Access Memory and SmartShift
• AMD Freesync display with at least 300 nits brightness, 100% sRGB or 72% NTSC gamut, refresh rate of 144Hz and above
• NVME PCIe Express Gen 3 SSD
• Over 10 hours of battery backup on continuous video playback

AMD Radeon RX 6000M Mobile GPU Availability

The first laptop with AMD Radeon RX 6000M mobile GPU is Asus ROG Strix G15 Advantage Edition. It comes with Ryzen 9 5900X and RX 6800M. It will be available starting in early June.

• Meanwhile, check out our Gaming PC build for under $1000.