AMD announces unified UDNA GPU architecture — bringing RDNA and CDNA together to take

[harlan4096]

Two become one.

Here in Berlin, Germany, at IFA 2024, AMD's Jack Huynh, the senior vice president and general manager of the Computing and Graphics Business Group, announced that the company will unify its consumer-focused RDNA and data center-focused CDNA architectures into one microarchitecture, named UDNA, that will set the stage for the company to tackle Nvidia's entrenched CUDA ecosystem more effectively. The announcement comes as AMD has decided to deprioritize high-end gaming graphics cards to accelerate market share gains.

When AMD moved on from its GCN microarchitecture back in 2019, the company decided to split its new graphics microarchitecture into two different designs, with RDNA designed to power gaming graphics products for the consumer market while the CDNA architecture was designed specifically to cater to compute-centric AI and HPC workloads in the data center.

Huynh explained the reasoning behind the split in a Q&A session with the press and the rationale for moving forward with a new unified design. We also followed up for more details about the forthcoming architecture. Here's a lightly edited transcript of the conversations:

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.
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