Videocardz claims that while the rumour is that AMD refuses to mandate the use of the newer connector it doesn’t mean there won’t be Radeon GPUs equipped with it. In fact, there were already designs in the Radeon RX 7000 series from ASRock, which developed four cards with this connector (all based on the same PCB):

The source of the rumours was Benchlife which looked at the power requirements of AMD’s new RDNA4 series, now known as the Radeon RX 9070 series. AMD is reportedly planning two models: the RX 9070 XT and the RX 9070. According to these rumours, these cards will require around 260W in the reference design and up to 330W in custom variants.

According to Benchlife, AMD is not mandating the use of the new 16-pin power connector, known as 12VHWPR or 12V-2×6. The latter is an updated, more secure design adopted by NVIDIA’s RTX 40 series following the RTX 4090 melting issues.

Benchlife suggests there is a chance we will see Radeon RX 9070 XT cards with three 8-pin power connectors, a configuration more commonly associated with Radeon RX 7900 models.

The Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 are expected to launch at the end of January, “before the Lunar New Year.” Yesterday, there was a leak featuring the first custom variants from ASUS, which revealed that both SKUs will ship with 16GB of memory.

Source: Benchlife