A new patent filing by AMD has just provided a glimpse of what we can expect for the next generation of graphics cards, including a 12 chiplet architecture.
Patent applications may not be the most exciting things in the world for most people, but in the world of cutting-edge technology, they can offer intriguing clues on what the latest developments will be.
In this case, a patent newly filed by AMD provides an early look at what we can expect from the next generation of AMD graphics cards.
The details of the patents are extremely complicated and technical, but it appears to revolve around a chiplet architecture, which will involve twelve dies working in parallel, without a controlling central chip.
A look at what the future might hold for AMD GPUs
Digging further into the patent shows that most of the specifics of the patent application are focused on how work will be distributed between these chips. The chips will be assigned a specialization, such as a command processor, geometry engine, shader engine, and rasterizer.
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This allows each chiplet to be tuned to excel at a particular task. To preserve compatibility, the CPU and other components will only see the GPU chiplets as a single unit, with only the GPU firmware able to see and address the individual chiplets.
Experts have pointed out potential problems with this design, however. Since tasks such as Shader Engines would be distributed across multiple small chips, instead of being managed on the same die this could impose performance penalties.
To overcome this issue without lag the Shader engines would need to be flawlessly synchronized. Hardware Times speculated that this type of architecture is at least two generations away from general usage.
Rumors and leaks have suggested that the AMD Radeon RX 8900 XTX has been canceled, leaving the RX 9900 XTX as the first GPU to carry the torch for chiplet-based graphics cards.