AMD

Radeon RX 7000 GPUs Coming Later This Year With RDNA 3 Architecture and Chiplet Design

February 14, 2024

Radeon RX 7000 GPUs Coming Later This Year With RDNA 3 Architecture and Chiplet Design

I’m excited to share the latest details on AMD’s upcoming Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards. These new GPUs will bring major architectural changes and performance improvements when they launch later in 2022.

Overview of RDNA 3 Architecture

The Radeon RX 7000 series will be the first consumer GPUs based on AMD’s next-generation RDNA 3 architecture. This represents a major evolution over the current RDNA 2 architecture found in GPUs like the Radeon RX 6000 series.

Here are some of the key changes and improvements expected with RDNA 3:

Enhanced compute units: The basic building blocks of the GPU have been re-engineered to deliver higher performance and efficiency.
Chiplet design: RDNA 3 chips will be made up of multiple smaller dies interconnected with a high-speed interface. This allows for better yields.
Improved ray tracing: Ray tracing performance, including hardware-accelerated bounding box intersection testing, will see significant gains.
Refined AI acceleration: AMD says AI performance will improve thanks to optimizations across the architecture.
New memory options: RDNA 3 will likely support faster memory standards like GDDR6 and beyond.

Benefits of a Chiplet GPU Design

One of the biggest changes with RDNA 3 is the shift to a chiplet-based design for the GPU die. Instead of building a single, large monolithic chip, AMD will use multiple smaller dies connected together.

There are a few major benefits to this chiplet approach:

Improved yields: Smaller dies tend to have higher manufacturing yields. This can lower costs and reduce waste.
Flexibility: AMD can mix and match different chiplet configurations for different products. This allows more flexibility in product design.
Scalability: In the future, AMD should be able to easily scale GPUs by adding more chiplets. This could enable very large and powerful GPUs.
Performance: With optimized interconnects between chiplets, AMD is promising improvements in bandwidth, latency, and power efficiency.

Expected Performance Gains

AMD has said RDNA 3 will deliver over 50% higher performance per watt compared to RDNA 2 GPUs. Given the architectural enhancements and the shift to a chiplet design, I expect RX 7000 series graphics cards will bring major performance gains, perhaps even doubling the framerates possible in many games.

Some analysts are predicting RDNA 3 and chips like the rumored Radeon RX 7900 XT will outperform Nvidia’s current GeForce RTX 3090. Of course, Nvidia will likely counter with new GPUs of their own, but it seems AMD is poised to take back the high-end graphics crown for the first time in many years.

Launching Later This Year

AMD has stated that RDNA 3 GPUs will launch in the second half of 2022. More specifically, I expect the Radeon RX 7000 series release date will be sometime between September and November of this year.

AMD will likely announce more details on RDNA 3 architecture and reveal the first RX 7000 graphics cards at events later in 2022. The wait for the next generation of AMD GPUs is on! With major architecture changes like chiplets and significant performance improvements, RDNA 3 and the Radeon RX 7000 series will bring exciting new options for high-end gaming and creators. I can’t wait to get my hands on these new GPUs once they become available.