AMD has just shared some details about its RDNA 3 graphics cards (likely the RX 7000 series), including details on how they will advance in energy-efficient style and confirmation of using multiple board chips.
Wccftech (opens in new tab) noted that as part of AMD’s Financial Analyst Day 2022, its senior vice president of engineering at Radeon Technologies Group, David Wang, spoke about what must be achieved in terms of performance per watt by high-end GPUs, and they will be over 50% better than RDNA 2 when it comes to frame rates versus power consumption.
That’s an impressive leap, with AMD indicating that 50% is a possible baseline for working power-efficiently with RDNA 3, and depending on the exact GPU model, the gains can be more than that.
Another key point here is that Wang also mentions “advanced chiplet packaging” for RDNA 3, which means that according to a long string of rumors, at least one of the RX 7000 family will take a chiplet approach, so multiple chips GPU will be integrated (what is known as multi-chip module or MCM design).
Wang further confirmed the 5nm process that the RDNA 3 graphics cards will be built on, using a “rearchitected compute unit” alongside an “optimized graphics pipeline”, which is a fancy word telling us that major architectural and nuts and bolts under the hood on it will be boosting better performance and efficiency with RX 7000 GPUs. Graphics cards will also make use of AMD’s next generation Infinity Cache.
We can still expect next-gen cards to arrive this year, as we already knew, although AMD hasn’t given us a more specific timeframe than just ‘later in 2022’.
Analysis: Chiplets finally confirmed, but we will remain cautious on projected claims
It’s a big reveal that the RX 7000 cards will go with a chiplet design, and to finally confirm this after much theorizing (particularly as some talk on the GPU vine was starting to cast doubt on the idea of late). The MCM design will likely be for the flagship (Navi 31) and, according to previous rumors, the next model as well (Navi 32), perhaps.
AMD doesn’t reveal absolutely any information here, except for the existence of chiplets somehow with RDNA 3, so we don’t know exactly how this will play out. Still, confirmation that this is indeed in the works for Team Red’s next-gen Radeon products certainly makes things more interesting as we await the big reveal.
Regarding the claim of, to use AMD’s exact statement in the presentation slide, “>50% projected performance/watt increase”, as we noted, this indicates that we can expect RDNA 3 to be at least 50% better than the RDNA 2 GPUs – so some cards can even exceed this already impressive level of improvement.
Interestingly, in November 2020, AMD said that it was committed to bringing the same gains made from the original RDNA to RDNA 2 – which, as you may recall, was a 50% increase – to RDNA 3. , this prediction of a 50% increase is not new, although it now looks even more confident with the small addition of the ‘greater than’ sign.
However, we need to be very careful with expectations when it comes to pre-launch marketing details, and whether this could be AMD broadly adhering to the existing PR lines it has already established to build up the hype around RDNA 3. Obviously, the use of the word ‘designed’ in this presentation is certainly a sign to be cautious around this yet.
That said, rumors point not just to the MCM coming to RDNA 3, but to AMD moving forward with power efficiency – something that has definitely gone the other way when it comes to speculation about Nvidia’s RTX 4000 graphics cards.
Certainly, performance-per-watt jumps of (approximately) 50% consistently across three generations of RDNA GPUs are something to be trumpeted.
Where AMD might be in jeopardy compared to Nvidia’s high-end GPUs is in terms of raw performance, with Team Green potentially putting the pedal to the metal, power be damned, if the rumor is right; and besides, maybe the RTX 4000 release is much faster than the RDNA 3. In fact, a rumor points to the RTX 4090 release in August.
Still, the other obvious point to make here is whether Nvidia is really burning with robust power, and the RDNA 3 comes across as much more efficient in comparison, with rising energy bills becoming a growing concern, the cost to long-term use of a power-hungry graphics card can become a more important factor in purchasing decisions.