AMD: Navi Speculation, Rumours and Discussion [2019-2020]

Now that RDNA has been officially announced by AMD, people are saying PS5 gpu is based on RDNA 2. I have some reason to doubt that. This is a tweet by ex Pricipal Software Engineer for PS5:

AMD's RDNA2 GPU architecture confirmed. Will it mean multi-bounce ray tracing in native 4K at 60fps? with transparency? At what distance from the frustum, and angle/clip percentage in the viewport, will VRS apply? Very curious to see how directly these questions get addressed.
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If PS5 uses RDNA 2, he wouldn't be asking there questions about RDNA 2, because he would know the answers,

 

Hard to parse anything from that convo but it would be very interesting if there isn't feature parity between the 2 big consoles. War is afoot.

 

He's talking about raytracing performance, i.e. 4K resolution (more rays) with transparent surfaces (multiple hits per each ray).

 

These questions are about performance.

 

Right but those questions would also apply to the PS5 if it was running RDNA2.

 

He's recently taken a leave from Sony, and raytracing performance is probably still being tuned.

 

I dunno. The way the tweet of Matt Hargett is worded, it seems like he's saying "Will the inclusion of RDNA2 mean, in terms of performance, x, y, and z" not "We both have RDNA2, but what is the performance of x, y and z compare to each other".

 

Check out wobbledogs on tigsource. The game does just that with no tensor cores. I'd wait untill a siginificant portion of devs are actually using ML AI in their games to actually single out a portion of our precious sillicon to accelerate that kind of algo specifically. When that happens, it might even turn out that Tensors are not even the best tool for the job.

 

Go read the Console threads around the time he tweeted that to see the painfully extensive discussions around it.

 

He talks about performance and if you see the discussion later, I think he talks about API efficiency. And it is the case, it means you can solve it.

 

Can’t imagine sony going for rdna1, everything points to it being rdna2 so far.

 

If/since the gpu is customized (to a certain extent of course), is the nomenclature RDNA1 or 2 relevant ?

 

Very much so - to forum warriors.

 

AFAIK it's Samsung building their own derivative specifically for stuff they make, so android phones and tablets. The agreement is definitely not semi-custom, but looks more along the lines like what AMD did with sublicensing Zen for the Hygon Dhyana: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15493/hygon-dhyana-reviewed-chinese-x86-cpus-amd

Though I imagine unlike that the basic layout won't be crimped and there won't be any need for weird financial shells and such. Not to mention making their own takes on the arch, I imagine we'll be seeing custom 2-12 CU GPUs for super low tdps, not something AMD even has as of right now, so assumedly something they'll be doing themselves.

 

They're licensing the IP and "adapting it for low-power usage" is the official description. All that is known is that Samsung is putting a lot of the engineering effort forth themselves (they're very obviously synthesising it themselves, that's a given), the only big question that remains unanswered is what the scope of changing the RTL is, as far as I understand that *is* taking place in some form, in coordination with AMD though.

 

AMD was aiming at higher freq & higher "ipc".

Navi10 is pretty small die (251mm^2) and if you make a chip the size of vega20 (331mm^2), using rdna2 architecture you have essentially a 2080ti minimum frames. Using about 150% less power than Radeon Vii.

 

Sure like to see that happening.

 

You'd only need a dozen of them to power up your entire house!

 

Made my night

 

Is it mathematically possible to have 150% less of something? So confused.