AMD will combine RDNA for games and CDNA for AI accelerators into a single graphics architecture UDNA

In a conversation with Tom’s Hardware, Jack Huynh, senior vice president and general manager of AMD’s Compute and Graphics Solutions Group, said the company is once again planning to combine its graphics architectures for gaming graphics cards and compute accelerators. This is necessary to scale and meet the needs of developers.

Image source: AMD

Earlier it was reported that AMD decided to shift its focus from the limited segment of flagship video cards for enthusiasts to expanding its presence in the segment of mass-market GPU models. However, in the same conversation, Guin said that the RDNA and CDNA architectures will be combined in the future.

In 2020, AMD announced the division of its graphics architectures after GCN into RDNA (for gaming) and CDNA (for data centers). The CDNA graphics architecture began to be used as the basis for specialized accelerators Radeon Instinct, later renamed simply Instinct. Although at that time it seemed justified to separate and optimize graphics architectures for certain scenarios, it became difficult for developers to navigate these optimizations. As a result, the company decided to unify the architecture again.

«Part of the big change at AMD is that today we have the CDNA architecture for Instinct accelerators for data centers and the RDNA architecture for consumer graphics cards. They are branched. Moving forward, we will combine them into one called UDNA. This will be a unified architecture designed for both Instinct and consumer solutions. Thanks to this unification, we will greatly simplify the tasks for developers who today have to choose which architecture to work with,” said Guigne.

By simplifying the architecture, developers will only need to focus their attention on one system, whether they’re running large GPU clusters or a single gaming GPU.

The company will now also plan graphics architectures three generations ahead (RDNA5, UDNA6 and UDNA7) to maintain optimizations without having to reset them every time AMD changes its memory hierarchy.

AMD has not yet officially announced a strategy for transitioning to the UDNA unified graphics architecture. When this will happen – with the release of RDNA 5 or later – is unknown. In fact, the company has not yet revealed much about the future RDNA 4 graphics architecture, which is expected to become the main graphics card of the Radeon 8000.