12 PCWorld APRIL 2020NEWS AMD TALKS PC GPU
percent performance-per-watt improvement
with its first-generation “Navi” GPU—now it’s
aiming to do it again with the upcoming Navi
2X. That’s crazy!
As for the data center, AMD’s plan is to
design a compute-specific version of RDNA,
also known as compute DNA, or CDNA. CDNA
will be scalable for multi-GPU for exascale
computing and machine learning. AMD also
confirmed CDNA 2, with the 3rd-generation
AMD Infinity Fabric Architecture.
“This is a good move as datacenter GPUs
don’t need many of the features a consumer
graphics card needs,” said Patrick Moorhead,
principal analyst at Moor Research, in an email.
“[CDNA] includes elements like display and pixel
rendering engines, and ray tracing. This means
AMD can save cost by removing those elements
and add more gates that help datacenter
performance like tensor OPS. AMD hadn’t done
it until today because it couldn’t afford to havetwo architectures. I believe AMD can field a high
performance datacenter GPU, but it will need to
invest at least as much in software to complete
the solution.”WHAT IT ALL MEANS FOR
THE PC
AMD created an “execution machine” in
processors, did the same with GPUs, and
combined the two into an APU. Now, there’s
a $32 billion PC market waiting for what’s
next, said Rick Bergman, executive vice
president of Computing and Graphics for
AMD. Before the end of the year, we’ll know:
the fourth-generation Ryzen processor.
Having secured desktop PC share of about
17 percent, AMD also has its eye trained on the
mobile space, with its mobile Ryzen chips
aimed squarely at the notebook space and
especially commercial PCs. A key technology is
Modern Standby, with five times the number of
laptops now
supporting the
technology versus the
prior generation,
Bergman said. AMD
is also claiming that
versions of the
3rd-gen mobile Ryzen
will deliver up to 18
hours of battery life.
(That number typically
varies quite a bit in the
Here’s what AMD is saying about hardware ray tracing. real world.)