AMD has introduced a new patent for graphics cards. This could mean a performance boost and other benefits in the future. MeinMMO explains what it is all about.
What kind of patent is this? A little over a week ago, an AMD patent titled “Distributed Geometry” was published by the US Patent Office. The patent itself was filed by AMD in April 2023. The patent describes a complete chiplet approach for GPUs, where the rendering workload is distributed across a series of chips instead of having a massive chip handling the entire processing.
This architecture is not necessarily new, as AMD has already successfully implemented such a chiplet system in its Ryzen processors. However, for graphics cards, this could mean a significant performance boost in the future.
Performance leap and especially cost savings
Why is AMD doing this? The chiplet design primarily has the advantage of lowering manufacturing costs in the long run. Very powerful chips are only marginally cost-efficient, as fewer chips can fit on silicon wafers. By dividing into many small modules, significantly more chips can fit on a wafer. If chips are damaged during production, they are completely lost. With many small chips, despite failures, many more chips remain.
On the other hand, this ideally also means a significant performance boost if the new chiplet design makes its way into the new graphics cards.
What challenges are there? AMD must overcome some hurdles for a powerful design. Because on a graphics chip, huge amounts of data are shifted, copied, or transferred in nanoseconds.
With the transition to a chiplet design, the system, which connects everything with the shared cache and memory controllers, needs to be completely rebuilt. However, AMD should bring enough experience from the CPU sector here.
AMD graphics cards with chiplet design are expected no earlier than 2025
When will the first graphics cards arrive? For now, we can only speculate when the new chiplet design might appear in graphics cards. Colleagues from PCGamer consider it unlikely that AMD will showcase the new design in the next generation. RDNA4 is supposedly set to launch in 2024.
Many speculate that AMD graphics cards with a completely new chiplet design will hit the market no earlier than 2025.
What would this mean for us? The transition could provide a significant advantage for AMD’s new graphics cards.
Especially for the market, competitive graphics cards from AMD could be a strong statement, as Nvidia currently dominates here. And it might be beneficial for competition and prices if AMD succeeds in gaining some market shares from Nvidia.
This “chase” has been successful for AMD with its Ryzen processors: Here, AMD has been able to take considerable market shares from the dominant player Intel for several years and is often regarded as the better recommendation, also thanks to better prices:
