AMD’s RDNA4 GPU architecture has seemingly made an appearance, but not in the way some of us would have expected. Evidence of its development reportedly reared its head in the form of the chipmaker’s Radeon Open Compute Platform, or ROCm, Validation Suite.
As per a recent posting on GitHub, it looks like AMD software engineers are laying the groundwork for the GPU, which in this case is the Navi 48, or NV48. And just to be clear, it has nothing to do with the NVIDIA NV48 GPU that launched way back in 2004.
Navi 48https://t.co/Jfif1aVWLV
— Kepler (@Kepler_L2) April 5, 2024
Sadly, the repository doesn’t contain any detail or confirmation of the spec of the RDNA4 GPU but as far as speculations go, we can expect AMD to first ship it out with its Radeon 8000 Series graphics cards. On another note, the Navi 48 GPU may feature 32 Work Group Processors but it is not expected to go toe-to-toe with NVIDIA’s own next-generation Blackwell equivalent. Instead, AMD could just release two new upper mid-range GPUs, rather than enthusiast-grade models from the get-go, just as it did when it launched the Radeon 7000 Series more than a year ago.
Further, and this is just speculation on our part, AMD could make its RDNA4-based graphics cards the first in the market to ship out with support for PCIe Gen5 and use GDDR7, the latter being a rather important shift, given that it still stuck to GDDR6 with the current Radeon series.
