AMD's Scott Herkelman recently sat down with Club386 for an interview, answering some questions related to the RDNA 3 "Radeon RX 7000" GPUs and the recent Gamescom 2023 announcements.
AMD Radeon Boss Talks RDNA 3 & Future GPUs: Power Efficiency, Ray Tracing, SKU Target Segments & 12VHPWR
The interview is very detailed and we would like you to visit Club386 and read the full thing here but some interesting comments were made regarding a few aspects of the RDNA 3 "Radeon RX 7000" GPU family and what we can expect in the coming generation.
Back when AMD was in the process of launching its RDNA 3 GPU architecture, the company promised a monumental +54% increase in power efficiency vs. RDNA 2 GPUs through the use of chiplets and other changes. However, the launch saw little gains in the efficiency department, all the while NVIDIA took their efficiency to a whole new level with the Ada GPU architecture. Scott says that AMD believes in offering good performance per watt across their GPU lineup & that it matters more on the notebook front. So far, AMD has only introduced its non-chiplet Navi 33 to laptops.
On the desktop side of things, it is mentioned that while GPU efficiency still matters, most PC gamers don't care for it as much. The Radeon boss says that they will have to catch up while also trying to fix a slew of issues that plague RDNA 3 GPUs such as the idle power consumption that's yet to be fully resolved on the latest Radeon RX 7000 cards.
We look at perf per watt on every chart when bringing all chips to market. In notebooks, it matters greatly. In desktop, however, it matters, but not to everyone. There are some people who are really concerned about power, others don’t care as much. We definitely want to make a better perf-per-watt chip.
Power is definitely a prime initiative. You’ll see us over time get better and better at it. We need to catch up. There are still bugs that we need to fix. Idle power is one of them. We believe there is a driver fix for it. It’s a wonky one, actually.
Scott Herkelman (AMD SVP of Graphics) via Club386
Going further into the power design, AMD says that they had plans to utilize 12VHPWR power connectors on the Radeon RX 7000 GPUs but that changed due to the flimsy design of the cable. Scott even throws some shade at NVIDIA for calling the whole situation a "User-Error" whereas when users reported issues with the vapor chamber on the RX 7900 XTX cards, they offered a solution and fix to all that were affected.
AMD still says they are open to adopting the 12VHPWR connector in future graphics cards but the design and power issues related to it need to be addressed first by the manufacturers. It should be pointed out that most of the 12VHPWR cable issues were fixed with an updated design that's been rolling out across all RTX 40 GPUs. Almost all of the cases were reported with the RTX 4090 GPUs & the new designs seem to be unaffected by burning/melting problems.
We specifically, for 7900 Series, and even 7600, we didn’t plan on the new power cable, but 7800 and 7700 did have a plan for it.
Until this power issue is cleaned up and there’s good confidence it’s working correctly for end users, that’s where you’ll start to see us incorporate it into our planning. The ability for someone to say it’s an end-user’s fault is a little strange to AMD and definitely strange to me.
Scott Herkelman (AMD SVP of Graphics) via Club386
Another thing that Scott touches upon is Ray Tracing which he believes is something that the AMD Radeon division has to do better on in the future. The company does believe that in terms of price to performance, they have an edge in ray tracing there but in terms of overall performance, NVIDIA sits well ahead of them and that's something that they continue to work with through their ISV partners for gamers.
In previous interviews, AMD has mentioned how RDNA 4 GPUs will continue to evolve the graphics performance envelope even higher despite rumors of there being no high-end RDNA 4 GPUs in the coming generation. The company has also confirmed that there will be no new ASIC for RDNA 3 but new products with slightly refreshed specs may still be on the table.
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