Jack Huynh [JH], AMD: So, part of a big change at AMD is today we have a CDNA architecture for our Instinct data center GPUs and RDNA for the consumer stuff. It’s forked. Going forward, we will call it UDNA. There’ll be one unified architecture, both Instinct and client [consumer]. We’ll unify it so that it will be so much easier for developers versus today, where they have to choose and value is not improving.
We forked it because then you get the sub-optimizations and the micro-optimizations, but then it’s very difficult for these developers, especially as we’re growing our data center business, so now we need to unify it. That’s been a part of it. Because remember what I said earlier? I’m thinking about millions of developers; that’s where we want to get to. Step one is to get to the hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and hopefully, one day, millions. That’s what I’m telling the team right now. It’s that scale we have to build now.
Tom’s Hardware [TH] , Paul Alcorn: So, with UDNA bringing those architectures back together, will all of that still be backward compatible with the RDNA and the CDNA split?
JH: So, one of the things we want to do is …we made some mistakes with the RDNA side; each time we change the memory hierarchy, the subsystem, it has to reset the matrix on the optimizations. I don’t want to do that.
So, going forward, we’re thinking about not just RDNA 5, RDNA 6, RDNA 7, but UDNA 6 and UDNA 7. We plan the next three generations because once we get the optimizations, I don’t want to have to change the memory hierarchy, and then we lose a lot of optimizations. So, we’re kind of forcing that issue about full forward and backward compatibility. We do that on Xbox today; it’s very doable but requires advanced planning. It’s a lot more work to do, but that’s the direction we’re going.
PA: When you bring this back to a unified architecture, this means, just to be clear, a desktop GPU would have the same architecture as an MI300X equivalent in the future? Correct?
JH: It’s a cloud-to-client strategy. And I think it will allow us to be very efficient, too. So, instead of having two teams do it, you have one team. It’s not doing something that’s that crazy, right? We forked it because we wanted to micro-optimize in the near term, but now that we have scale, we have to unify back, and I believe it’s the right approach. There might be some little bumps.
PA: So, this merging back together, how long will that take? How many more product generations before we see that?
JH: We haven’t disclosed that yet. It’s a strategy. Strategy is very important to me. I think it’s the right strategy. We’ve got to make sure we’re doing the right thing. In fact, when we talk to developers, they love it because, again, they have all these other departments telling them to do different things, too. So, I need to reduce the complexity.
[…]From the developer’s standpoint, they love this strategy. They actually wish we did it sooner, but I can’t change the engine when a plane’s in the air. I have to find the right way to setpoint that so I don’t break things.
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