APRIL 2020 PCWorld 11BIG CHANGES IN AMD’S
GPU DESIGNS
Perhaps the most significant news of AMD’s
financial meeting was the fact that AMD would
be moving from a single GPU architecture to
multiple, domain-specific architectures.
Related and also significant will be the long-
awaited release of
hardware ray tracing
within the upcoming
RDNA 2 GPU architecture.
AMD is developing
specific versions of the
architectures for different
markets, such as the data
center, because it has
become increasingly
difficult to develop a
general GPU architecture
as Moore’s Law slows
down, said David
Wang, senior vice
president of the
Radeon Technologies
Group at AMD.
AMD’s PC GPU
architecture is known
as RDNA, and it’s been
the foundation of
recent Radeon cards.
Before the end of the
year, however, AMD
will ship RDNA 2
cards, which—
hurray!—will include hardware ray tracing,
optimized both for the game consoles based
upon the RDNA 2 architecture as well as PCs.
AMD sometimes refers to RDNA 2 as Navi 2X,
with Navi 3X to follow. (The rumored “Big
Navi” [go.pcworld.com/bnvi] codename
wasn’t used.) AMD already delivered a 50AMD will be offering different versions of its GPUs for different markets,
though it’s not exactly clear how profoundly they’ll differ from one another.
AMD is now beginning to chart its PC GPU architecture, known as RDNA,
out several years. And there’s ray tracing!