Highly anticipated: One brave Redditor who trawled through the deep mines of macOS Big Sur code has uncovered preliminary specifications for AMD’s upcoming Navi 21, Navi 22, and Navi 23 GPUs. Although the information isn’t entirely precise, it’s sufficient to conclude that these will be very, very powerful GPUs.
Listed plainly and clearly within macOS code is the number of compute units each GPU will have: Navi 21 will have 80, Navi 22 will have 40, and Navi 23 will have 32. Assuming that each compute unit corresponds to sixty-four shaders, the GPUs will have 5120, 2560, and 2048 shaders respectively. The clock speeds for each GPU are a little more ill-defined, and we’ll explain why in a second, but the driver lists speeds from 2 GHz to 2.5 GHz.
This site was created in January 2016 to supply the newest AMD graphics drivers to Boot Camp users who run Windows on their Mac. Official AMD PC drivers are not compatible with Mac versions of the graphics cards by default, leaving Boot Camp users stuck with dated and poorly optimized drivers that are not compatible with the latest games. For AMD Radeon™ Graphics, AMD Radeon Pro Graphics, and AMD Processors with Radeon Graphics Only. For use with systems running Microsoft® Windows® 7 or 10 AND equipped with AMD Radeon™ graphics, AMD Radeon Pro graphics, or AMD processors with Radeon graphics. Download and run directly onto the system you want to update.
There’s also a mention of a Navi 31 GPU with 80 compute units; 5120 shaders; but there’s no other info on that chip yet – that one’s still a year from release.
- Explore the world of Mac. Check out MacBook Pro, iMac Pro, MacBook Air, iMac, and more. Visit the Apple site to learn, buy, and get support.
- Make sure that Virtualization/AMD-V is supported by your CPU and is enabled in your BIOS. Modern CPUs will definitely support this, but if you have an older CPU, you may want to double check. Your CPU also needs to support the SSE4.1 instruction set in order to run macOS Sierra and newer. Modern CPUs will also support this.
Radeon RX 6000
| Navi 21 | Navi 22 | Navi 23 | |
| Codename | Sienna Cichlid | Navy Flounder | Dimgrey Cavefish |
| Shaders | 5120 | 2560 | 2048 |
| Clock | 2050 MHz → 2200 MHz | 2500 MHz | |
| TDP | 200 W → 238 W | 170 W |
Mac Os On Amd Pc
There was incomplete information on Navi 23. And fun fact: AMD's GPU codenames are generated randomly.
Mac Os For Amd
Our heroic Redditor extracted all this information from the “AmdRadeonX6000HwServices” file in the newest beta of macOS 11 Big Sur. The beta is publicly available and so this data is easily verifiable – the only caveat is the possibility that AMD provided prototype information to Apple, or that the architecture has changed so significantly that the terms we’re used to now mean something else, but those are unlikely scenarios.
Clock speeds and TDPs usually aren’t finalized until just before release, so it’s best to treat these values as rough guides that the processors are capable of. The table below shows that the specs for Navi 10 disagrees slightly with the specifications of the RX 5700XT, the current flagship Navi 10 GPU. Both the clocks and the TDP are higher.
Radeon RX 5000
Os Mac For Amd Windows 10
| Navi 10 / RX 5700XT | Navi 14 / RX 5500XT | |||
| Shaders | 2560 | 1536 | ||
| Clock | 1400 MHz | 1605 MHz | 1900 MHz | 1607 MHz |
| TDP | 180 W | 225 W | 110 W | 130 W |
On the left: the GPU specifications as described in macOS Big Sur, on the right: the top end model's actual specifications as currently sold.
Although 5120 shaders are a lot less than the 10,000 or so CUDA cores on Nvidia’s newest GPUs, AMD and Nvidia take a markedly different approach to their unified shader units, even though a lot of the terminology used seems to be the same.
Nvidia's execution units (CUDA cores) are scalar in nature -- that means one unit carries out one math operation on one data component; by contrast, AMD's units (Stream Processors) work on vectors -- one operation on multiple data components. For scalar operations, they have a single dedicated unit. Further explanation of this is beyond the scope of this article, but you can check out our deep dive: Navi vs. Turing: An Architecture Comparison for more.
Obviously, there’s no telling exactly how fast Big Navi is going to be compared to Nvidia's RTX 30 series, for now at least. AMD is set to launch Radeon RX 6000 GPUs on October 28.
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OpenCore is what we refer to as a 'boot loader' – this is a complex piece of software that we use to prepare our systems for macOS – specifically by injecting new data for macOS such as SMBIOS, ACPI tables and kexts. How this tool differs from others like Clover is that it has been designed with security and quality in mind, allowing us to use many security features found on real Macs, such as SIP and FileVault. A more in-depth look can be found here: Why OpenCore over Clover and others
This guide specifically focuses on two main things:
- Installing macOS on an X86-based PC
- Teaching you what makes your Hack work
Because of this, you will be expected to read, learn and even use Google. This is not a simple one-click install setup.
Amd Os X
Please remember that OpenCore is still new and currently in beta. While quite stable, and arguably much more stable than Clover in pretty much every way, it is still being frequently updated, so chunks of configuration change quite often (i.e. new quirks replacing old ones).
Lastly, those having issues can visit both the r/Hackintosh subreddit and r/Hackintosh Discord for more help.