When AMD moved on from Vega to Navi architecture, it introduced a new name called ‘RDNA’ – which acts as the successor to Vega for its GPU lineup. The architecture was split into two segments to better optimize their respective markets, with RDNA2 serving consumer/prosumer market while CDNA was designated for datacenters.
However, the benefits is apparently getting outweighed, as AMD’s Jack Huynh wants to bring both back into one unified architecture in the future, aptly named ‘UDNA’. This was stated in Tom’s Hardware’s interview with him during IFA 2024, where he also revealed Radeon’s new strategy to regain market share.
AMD UDNA: Radeon’s Future?
It’s worth mentioning that Vega was also a unified architecture designed to serve both the gaming and datacenter markets – however, that architecture was infamous for one particular design decision in the architecture that made it underperform in games (and it was a compute beast comparing to contemporary NVIDIA GPUs at the time).
That is partly why RDNA was seen as the better solution, as the architecture is solely dedicated to the consumer market, meaning any priorities in architecture design for datacenters won’t end up hurting the gaming performance. Same goes to CDNA – the architecture can simply be designed to work particularly well with compute-heavy workloads without hurting the performance on other side of the GPU market.
There is one major issue with this approach, though. According to Huynh, having two architectures made developing harder than usual, and that can in turn hurt performance if either of them aren’t properly optimized to the specific architecture. Hence, he proposed the idea of ‘UDNA’ – a unified architecture that covers gaming all the way to datacenters, where it will be “so much easier for developers versus today.”
Nothing in particular is set in stone at this point, but Huynh did mention RDNA5, RDNA6, RDNA7, UDNA6, and UDNA7. The new approach requires three generations’ worth of advanced planning, and a similar concept is already adopted when designing the Xbox consoles.
You may ask, why gone through all these to unify both sides of the GPU isle? The answer is CUDA, NVIDIA’s hugely successful ecosystem that guaranteed its way to GPU dominance today. Most tools run significantly faster on CUDA – think Cinema 4D, Blender and the likes; Radeon has long lagged behind in this metric as it relies on other standards, including OpenCL and HIP.
It’s a long road to take for Team Red to challenge its rival’s GPU dominance, as NVIDIA now enjoys several trillions’ worth of value thanks to its booming GPU business in the AI segment. But you gotta start somewhere – and it looks like this is where AMD will be laying its groundwork to challenge Team Green many years down the line.
Pokdepinion: Big ambitions – I like it. (It won’t be easy though.)
