RDNA Architecture
What is NAVI then, well
NAVI is a new family of Radeon GPUs built to power the future of gaming across
PCs, consoles, cloud and other applications.
Sony’s next generation PlayStation for example will be powered by NAVI.
NAVI has an all new 7nm RDN (Radeon DNA) architecture that is different from
GCN and built from scratch as a gaming engine that will power gaming for the
next decade. This has been a long time
coming and is quite exciting news for this family of GPUs.
There are some key new
RDNA features that empower this engine.
New Compute Unit Design – The
compute units have been re-designed for efficiency and improved IPC. IPC is important for AMD, in both its new
CPUs and now with the new NAVI GPUs as well.
Multi-Level Cache Hierarchy – RDNA
uses a new cache system that allows latency to be reduced which in turn allows
higher bandwidth and lower power.
Streamlined Graphics Pipeline – The pipeline has been optimized for performance per-clock improves and higher GPU clock speeds. GPU clock speeds were always an issue with the GCN architecture, hopefully this has been solved with RDNA.
NAVI Features
While these are just three
main points of the architecture there is probably more to it than that. We do know that they will use GDDR6 memory,
which means the memory controller will have to have also been re-designed.
According to AMD NAVI is focused on gaming, it has faster clock speeds and gaming
performance at lower power. It is also the
world’s first PCIe 4.0 enabled gaming GPU.
This is quite a turn, AMD is the one now pushing the next generation of
PCIe, an unprecedented event.
At the keynote AMD noted that NAVI RDNA will have 1.25x performance per-clock improvement in RDNA versus GCN found in Vega which is 1.5x performance per-watt.
The new family of NAVI GPUs based off of RDNA will be the Radeon RX 5000 family. There will be a Radeon RX 5700 series video card. Radeon RX 5000 family is named in honor of AMD’s 50th anniversary.
In a demo shown at COMPUTEX AMD Radeon RX 5700 series was put up against a GeForce RTX 2070 in Strange Brigade benchmark and beat the competition by 10%.
NAVI will be launching in July; all the details will be revealed at E3.