A detailed study of the changes that occurred in AMD's presentation to investors from September to November allowed us to find out that the company does not want the filling of Sony and Microsoft's next-generation game consoles to be associated with the second-generation RDNA architecture by the public. AMD's custom-made products inside these consoles will provide hardware support for ray tracing, but so far company representatives are in no hurry to talk about the timing of extending such a function to discrete graphics. Vague formulations like βwhen the ecosystem is readyβ are usually used.
On the pages of the Chinese forum One trusted keeper of other people's secrets has published new information about AMD's plans. According to this source, at the January CES 2020 event in Las Vegas, company representatives should talk about the RDNA2 graphics architecture, which will provide support for ray tracing at the hardware level. This does not mean that the corresponding product will immediately appear on sale; video cards of this generation may be released during 2020, as the profile slide from the AMD presentation suggests.
The second-generation RDNA architecture, in addition to using an improved version of the 7-nm process technology with EUV lithography elements, is also credited with the ability to interleave GDDR6 memory with the ideological successor HBM2. In a professional environment, a new type of high-speed memory is usually called βHBM2Eβ, but at the layperson level it is often referred to as βHBM3β. SK Hynix and Samsung are already ready to offer HBM2E memory chips in 2020, and the speaker at the siteβs anniversary event AMD Vice President Joe Macri confirmed that the company is interested in this type of memory. The company helped develop the first generation HBM to Korean manufacturer SK Hynix over eight years.
There is a possibility that the family of graphics solutions with RDNA2 architecture will include flagship gaming products with HBM2E memory, since AMD is now trying with all its might to βpowderβ the lifeless body of the Radeon VII, not hiding from partners that it has long stopped supplying it. In fact, the position of AMDβs flagship gaming video card is temporarily vacant, and as soon as there is a βwindowβ in the busy premiere schedule, the company will be able to give an adequate answer to the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti, for example.
The Chinese source simultaneously talks about some special versions of graphics cards based on Navi 10, which, after functional restrictions, will be able to rank below the Radeon RX 5700 both in performance and in price. The Radeon RX 5500 series based on the Navi 14 GPU, according to the source, can also be expanded with a product with a full set of execution units - more than 22 for the current Radeon RX 5500. It is expected that such a product will appear as part of ready-made Apple computers, and Whether it will gain distribution outside the ecosystem of this brand is an open question.
Source: 3dnews.ru