Radeon RX 7000, based on the new generation of RDNA3 architecture, was another of the most interesting topics that AMD touched on during yesterday’s Financial Analyst Day 2022.. During the event, David Wang, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Radeon Technologies Group, confirmed these new graphics cards will use a chiplet designwhich will lead to the abandonment of the design of a monolithic core.

On this topic, it is important to note that that abandonment may be partial, that is, the leap to the design of multi-chip modules could be limited to the high-end Radeon RX 7000, ie Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7800 XT. The Radeon RX 7700 XT and lower would retain the monolithic core design, as using less complex GPUs and fewer shaders would be perfectly viable in such a wafer design.

Not confirmed yet the exact distribution that AMD will make of the chips it will give life to the RDNA3 architecture, but according to the latest leaks I have been able to see, we could find the following breakdown:

• Two big chips that would make up a super GPU.
• Four smaller chiplets, where an infinite L3 cache (64 MB per chiplet) would be integrated.
• Chiplet with all I / O elements.

If that’s true, we should total seven chipletsand there is no doubt that this would be one of AMD’s greatest advances in the graphics sector in recent years, but it would not be the only one, as we will see below.

Radeon RX 7000 could use the new CU with 128 shaders

In case anyone gets lost, I remind you that the CU is the base unit used by the AMD GPU and is the direct equivalent of NVIDIA SM units. Under RDNA2 architecture, The CU has 64 shaders, 4 texturing units and a beam tracking accelerator unit. The RDNA3 architecture used in the Radeon RX 7000 will use a completely redesigned CU, which seems to suggest that AMD could make the leap to configuration 128 shaders.

Note that this is not confirmed, but it really makes a lot of sense. On the other hand, it may also be the case that this redesign is related to the transition to an MCM configuration, which means that 64 shaders could be retained and that changes would be limited to other minor modifications that are necessary to make this configuration viable. It won’t be long before we know this, as the launch of the Radeon RX 7000 is expected fourth quarter of this year.

On the other hand, AMD has also confirmed that the Radeon RX 7000 will use a TSMC 5nm node, although we are aware that some models could use a 6nm node, and ensures that the RDNA3 architecture improves power per watt consumed by 50% against RDNA2. What does it mean? Well, it’s very simple that a graphics solution based on the RDNA3 architecture, which it consumes like others based on RDNA2, can yield up to 50% more.

RDNA3 architecture it returns to the infinite cache, as we have already indicated when we talked about chiplet distribution, but with two important peculiarities. The first is that AMD defines it as a “new generation”, which means that it could improve performance latencies and that it will also have more capacity because it will go from a maximum of 128 MB to 256 MB.

In the attached roadmap we can see that the successor to RDNA3 will be the architecture of RDNA4 and that its release should be produced between 2023 and 2024. We still don’t have the details for this future graphic generation.