With RDNA4’s reveal inching closer, what’s next for AMD’s GPU department? The company hasn’t officially published a roadmap beyond RDNA4, but Team Red has previously confirmed that UDNA will supersede RDNA at one point. The question is when – and one leaker has the answer.
UDNA Replacing RDNA
First of all, the change to UDNA signifies the reunification of AMD’s consumer/prosumer graphics design (Radeon / Radeon Pro) and its datacenter-focused GPU architecture (AMD Instinct). Originally, both segments were derived from the same Vega architecture, but was later split into RDNA for consumer and CDNA for datacenter markets to better fit the each segment’s needs.
According to Chiphell leaker ‘zhangzhonghao’ (via Videocardz), here’s the known information so far:
– There’s no RDNA5 codename anymore, after RDNA4 it’s UDNA
– (AMD Instinct) MI400 and (Radeon) RX 9000 series will adopt the same UDNA architecture, which uses an ALU design similar to GCN [Polaris/Vega] architectures
– UDNA’s gaming GPU is tentatively planned to enter mass production in Q2 2026
– Sony’s PS6 will use UDNA, but CPU is undecided between Zen 4 or Zen 5, their gaming handheld will be using AMD hardware as well
– Microsoft’s Xbox handheld is reportedly between Qualcomm and AMD? I’m not sure on this
– The information above comes from sources in the supply chain, I have no idea on anything like specs and performance.
Quite a bit of information to take in, but it remains to be seen what will UDNA look like as a result of combining both segments once again. It’s possible that the unification of architecture is to simplify development, but juggling both the needs of datacenter and gaming will likely be tricky as components like ray tracing is not needed in the context of datacenter computing.
On the other hand, the news on PS6’s development and the alleged release date of UDNA desktop GPUs may align with the new cycle of console hardware releases. The gap between PS4 and PS5 was 7 years (late 2013 to 2020), and assuming all the timelines are correct, a new console in late 2026 or sometime in 2027 doesn’t sound too far-fetched to introduce 10th generation consoles.
Pokdepinion: Let’s hope it’ll be a better competition to what NVIDIA has in store in the future.
