AMD announces UDNA architecture for GPUs

AMD has officially announced that it will unify the RDNA (gaming) and CDNA (AI servers and accelerators) architectures into a framework called UDNA.

Speaking to Tom’s Hardware, Jack Huynh, senior vice president and general manager of the computing and graphics business division, said this will facilitate development and allow for greater competition within the graphics card market.

Part of the big change we’re making at AMD today is that we have the CDNA architecture for Instinct server GPUs and RDNA for consumer GPUs. It’s split. Moving forward, we’re going to call it UDNA. It’s going to be a unified architecture, with both Instinct and consumer GPUs. We’re going to unify it, and that’s going to make the process for developers much simpler, rather than what we see today, where they have to choose and their value isn’t improving.

Jack Huynh

Huynh also reinforces that AMD made some mistakes with its RDNA architecture, something they believe will not happen with the new UDNA – thanks to the optimizations that ensure better use of this new unified design.

We made some mistakes on the RDNA side, every time we changed the memory hierarchy, the subsystem, we had to reset the optimization matrix. We don’t want that. Going forward, we’re not just thinking about RDNA 5, RDNA 6, and RDNA 7, but UDNA 6 and UDNA 7. We’re planning for the next three generations because once we have the optimizations, I don’t want to change the memory hierarchy and lose all of them. We’re pushing this issue of full backward and forward compatibility. We do that with Xbox today, it’s possible, but it requires advanced planning. There’s a lot of work to do, but that’s the direction we’re going.

Jack Huynh

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AMD’s accession of UDNA

In short, AMD’s UDNA architecture will make it easier for developers – since they will need to focus on just one system, regardless of whether they are building optimizations for AI GPUs or whether they will work on GPUs like the Radeon line in the future.

Although they have not officially disclosed their plans, it is possible that this union of architectures will begin with the RDNA 5 generation – which would be an ideal point, considering that they have already announced that RDNA 4 will be focused on “mid-range scale” products for Radeon.

It is important to highlight that one of its biggest rivals in the market, NVIDIA, already does this with CUDA cores – and AMD will seek to enter into a more fierce dispute by unifying its architectures through UDNA.

Fonte: TweakTown