AMD: RDNA 3 Speculation, Rumours and Discussion

Each chiplet seems to be able to function in a fully autonomous way. They all have their own memory PHY, set of fixed function blocks (probably video codecs?), and they communicate with each other through the L3.

To me this looks a bit like first-gen Zen but in a GPU. It also means there could be a lot of wasted space due to a bunch of fixed-function blocks being replicated and useless for all chiplets but one. Though if they could get the video codecs to work in parallel it would be awesome, especially if more chiplets = higher resolution or higher framerate encoding).

 

Won't you waste space with MCM solutions ? I mean you still need the transistors for compute functions, etc, but now you need to have more external buses to make the multiples parts of the chip communicate between them ? I'm sure I'm missing something here. Or it's "just" about yield ?

 

Not just yield but also versatility on using the same chip for a multitude of SKUs and performance ranges, the economy of scale achieved by it, and the money saved by developing only one chip.

 

A whole bunch of new patents, some GPU-relevant:

https://www.freepatentsonline.com/20200409859.pdf

https://www.freepatentsonline.com/20200409695.pdf

https://www.freepatentsonline.com/20200379767.pdf

And possibly more soon:
https://twitter.com/Underfox3