AMD will unify Radeon and Pro graphics to battle Nvidia’s dominance

AMD plans to unify the architectures used by its datacenter and consumer graphics architectures in what one company executive is calling a “new DNA,” or a “unified DNA,” that combines its CDNA and RDNA architectures.

The goal is to bring more developers into the fold, a complement to AMD’s adjustment to its consumer Radeon GPU plans to attack mainstream but not flagship enthusiast products.

Like Steve Ballmer’s famous push to land developers, so too is AMD trying to land a core group of software developers that can write apps for Radeon silicon. If AMD concentrates on the small number of customers who will buy a flagship GPU, it won’t attract as many developers as pushing mainstream products, Jack Huynh, AMD’s senior vice president and general manager of Computing and Graphics told a Friday breakfast meeting of reporters at the IFA show in Berlin. Huynh first called the new unified effort “new DNA,” but also referred to it as a unified architecture, or UDNA.

“Part of the big change of AMD is today we have a CDNA architecture [for datacenters] and RDNA for the consumer side,” Huynh said. “Going forward, we’ll call it New DNA. There will be one unified architecture, both Instinct [AMD’s enterprise GPU architecture] and commercial side, so that we unify it. It will be so much easier for developers. Today they have to choose, and it’s not accruing value.

“The reason why we forked it, because then you get the sub-optimizations and recommended issues, but then it’s very difficult for these developers, especially as we’re growing our data business. I mean, now we may introduce it to unify it. That’s going to help it quite a bit. Because remember, I said earlier, I’m thinking about millions of developers, that’s where we want to get to.”

The process will take time, Huynh said. “But that’s why I’m telling the team right now,” he said. “It’s that scale we have to build now.”

Huynh said that AMD had made “mistakes” on the development of RDNA. “Each time we change the memory of a subsystem, that has to reset the matrix on the optimizations,” he said. “I don’t want to do that.”

When developing future generations of RDNA, Huynh said that he didn’t want to change the memory hierarchy and then lose all of the optimizations. “It’s very doable, it just requires advanced planning, and a lot more work to do it. But that’s the direction.”

Toms Hardware noted that AMD’s consumer GPUs have lacked strong AI support, and that the new revisions might allow AMD to more directly attack Nvidia’s CUDA architecture and DLSS. Nvidia has been a favored architecture in consumer AI generation, such as AI art, both because of CUDA’s deep developer support as well as the sheer horsepower of Nvidia GPUs. But when will this happen? And will it be effective? This feels like a plan AMD will begin explaining more in the weeks ahead.

Additional reporting by Adam Patrick Murray. Lenovo paid for Murray’s hotel and lodging. PCWorld’s Mark Hachman attended IFA at the request of Qualcomm, which paid for hotel and travel. Both companies did not influence PCWorld’s editorial content.