AMD has patented a new GPU design that takes a radically new approach to building a graphics chip. The patent details an AMD GPU design that contains 14 chiplets, which are divided into several sections, enabling it to all act as one single GPU, or even multiple GPUs.
The best graphics cards from AMD, such as the Radeon RX 7800 XT, are already divided into several chiplets under the hood, but the GPU itself is still all in one chip – what we call a monolithic die. It’s only the cache that’s separated out into extra chiplets on these GPUs. Conversely, this AMD patent effectively details nine separate GPU dies in one chip package.
The figures in the patent show the GPU being divided into three sections, each of which contain a front end chiplet and three shader engine dies, the latter of which would contain all the stream processors used for graphics processing. Each of these clusters is linked to each other, and can communicate with two further dies – a mode selector and a multimedia die.
Separating it out into several smaller components can not only improve yields when it comes to production (a manufacturing error on one small chiplet die is much more preferable to one on a whole GPU), but also enables AMD to mix and match different manufacturing processes.
As with AMD’s Ryzen CPUs, which use different processes to make the CPU cores and the I/O hub, AMD could make its shader engine dies on the latest TSMC process, where speed and efficiency are paramount, but could then produce the multimedia die and mode selector dies on an older, cheaper, and more readily-available process.
R&I~Smit
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Article URL : https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/multi-chiplet-gpu