Beastly specs revealed for cancelled AMD RDNA 4 flagship
AMD’s Multi-Chip RDNA 4 GPU Flagship appears to be a MONSTER – Too bad it was cancelled
Rumour has it that AMD’s original plans for their RDNA 4 architecture would have seen the company build a huge chiplet-based flagship called Navi 4C. This huge graphics card from AMD reportedly features nine RDNA 4 compute chiplets, though the design was reportedly cancelled. Now, thanks to source code uncovered by Kepler-L2, it looks like these rumours were true.
Below, we can see code that references nine Shader Engines (SE). That alone shows us that AMD’s plans for RDNA 4 were ambitious. After all, AMD’s RDNA 3 flagship, the RX 7900 XTX, uses Navi 31 silicon. That GPU core design only has six Shader Engines.
If AMD’s RDNA 4 chiplet rumours are true, AMD planned to split each Shader Engine onto its own chiplet. This would reduce the cost of AMD’s planned flagship by allowing AMD to use a multitude of smaller chips instead of a single, gargantuan piece of monolithic silicon. Even so, such a huge chiplet-based design has its complexities, and those complexities may be the reason why this GPU was reportedly cancelled.
(Nine Shader Engines have been listed for AMD’s RDNA 4 flagship – Image via Kepler_L2)
When discussing Navi 4X, adroc_thurston, who appears to be familiar with this planned AMD RDNA 4 flagship GPU, reported that the graphics card had over 200 CUs. Specifically, they said that the GPU had “a fair bit” over 200 CUs. This suggests that AMD’s planned flagship may be over two times as powerful as AMD’s RX 7900 XTX. After all, AMD’s Radeon RX 7900 XTX has 96 total GPU Compute Units (CUs).
Radeon’s cancelled RDNA 4 flagship sets expectations high for AMD RDNA 5
AMD is reportedly planning to only offer consumers mid-range and lower-end RDNA 4 GPUs. That means that we are unlikely to see a chiplet-based Radeon monster graphics card until the release of RDNA 5. It is unknown why AMD’s RDNA 4 flagship was reportedly cancelled, but its probable that this problem will be addressed by the time it comes to launch RDNA 5. Should we expect AMD’s RDNA 5 flagship to be a colossal chiplet-based graphics card?
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