Get ready for new Radeon PC graphics cards.
AMD is promising that its next-generation GPU architecture, RDNA 3, will deliver a greater than 50% performance-per-watt improvement over RDNA 2.
During an investors conference on Thursday, the company teased some details about the upcoming GPUs, which are slated to launch later this year to compete with Nvidia’s own next-gen products.
AMD plans on achieving the 50% performance uplift by using a 5-nanometer manufacturing process, likely from TSMC, which represents an upgrade from the 7nm process found in the RDNA 2 architecture. The improvement should allow AMD to pack even more transistors on the silicon while retaining the same overall footprint.
In addition, the new architecture will adopt an “advanced chiplet packaging” design so that the company can meld several smaller chips together to build the GPU. The design approach should also help keep costs down.
“It allows us to continue to scale performance aggressively, without the yield and cost concerns of a large monolithic silicon,” AMD Radeon SVP David Wang said during the presentation. “It allows us to deliver the best performance at the right cost.”
Other improvements include better power efficiency and a “re-architectured compute unit with enhanced ray-tracing capabilities” for even more photorealistic imagery, Wang said.
“With so many exciting technologies, I’m very excited to say that RDNA 3 will deliver incredible performance and energy efficiency to power the next generation of games,” he added.
Expect AMD to release more details about RDNA 3 around September. During the presentation, Wang also teased the successor to RDNA 3. In a presentation slide, he showed that RDNA 4 is slated to arrive by 2024. But beyond that, he didn’t reveal much else.