AMD's Navi graphics processors confirm the maintenance of their GCN design

AMD has already started developing Navi drivers on the Linux platform. The last part of the code tells Navi to continue the trend of GCN-based GPUs.

Phoronix recently discovered references to Navi while monitoring various Git repositories. The AMDGPU LLVM backend now displays "GFX1010" and, with GFX900 as Vega, GFX1010 can only be Navi.

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The code snippets for using GCN are as follows.

• EF_AMDGPU_MACH_AMDGCN_LAST =
• EF_AMDGPU_MACH_AMDGCN_GFX1010

Phoronix claims that Navi support is unlikely in the future Linux 5.2 kernel and could be suspended until version 5.3 Linux kernel. The current version of Windows for Linux 5.3 stable is the September version. The Linux 5.3 kernel is perhaps the first Linux kernel to support Navi by the general public. Assuming that Navi versions are released between May and July, we may not see much support for these GPUs until Linux 5.3 is released. Until then, Linux users may need to take steps to get their new Navi GPUs working properly.

We had already seen Navi be considered a post-GCN design, which means that it could potentially bypass the limit of 4096 outlets of GCN, but this is not the case. In the past, it had been claimed that the architecture of GCN would require important adjustments to allow the addition of SP, to the point that a completely new architecture would have increased its appeal. GCN was designed on the cutting edge of 28 nm technology and was not designed to take advantage of the benefits of 7 nm technology.

GCN is also a memory-free concept, requiring the use of expensive HBM for performance gains, although it has been reported that Navi would benefit from GDDR6. This is seen when we compare the Radeon RX Vega 64 and Radeon VII. Both GPUs are based on the Vega architecture, the Radeon VII being slightly higher but with twice the memory bandwidth.

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Rumors point to possible revelations at Computex, followed by the full launch with Ryzen 3000 on 7/7, referring to 7 nm.

At the moment, we know little about AMD's next-generation Arcturus microarchitecture, but we know that GPU naming systems will come back in a simpler, more familiar form, similar to the way Fiji have referred to the R9 Fury GPUs. and Hawaii talked about R9 290 GPU. Arcturus is thought to be based on 7nm +.

Alleged specifications of the AMD Radeon RX 3000 Series