Is AMD Developing a Next-Gen APU with Integrated GDDR7 Memory?

A fresh NBD finds points to what could be a future GDDR7-equipped chip with integrated CPU and GPU cores, which for an APU is code for AMD. The listing reveals that Micron’s latest GDDR7 memory is part of the CPU configuration. The GDDR6 memory or anything faster like GDDR7 DRAM will become the new standard as it not only doubles bandwidth over the current generation but is going to make NVIDIA’s Blackwell-based RTX 50 series virtually immune to VR/5K bottlenecking.

AMD’s Next-Gen APU Soon?

This announcement should not be surprising given that Micron revealed its GDDR7 memory a few months back featuring 32Gbps speeds offering up to 1.5TB per second capacity and providing up to a claimed performance boost of around 30% in games across various PC resolutions as well. This memory is also designed for AI at the Edge and AI PC platforms, which will be crucial for chipmakers like AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Apple in the coming years.

AMD has been a pioneer in the “AI PC” SoC space, introducing the first NPU with its “Phoenix” APUs and refining it in Hawk Point APUs and the forthcoming Strix, which offers up to 55 TOPS of AI compute. The company is also developing its next-gen Strix Halo APUs, featuring a chiplet design with up to 16 Zen 5 cores and 40 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores.

All those GPU cores require a fair bit of bandwidth. While AMD’s Strix Halo chips have both an LLC, featuring 32 MB MALL, additional bandwidth will be necessary to support high-performance GPU throughput. Support for faster LPDDR5X-8533 memory is also expected on these chips which will offer a drastic bandwidth boost. Though no reports claim that this includes on-package memory, the listing for the chips has shown up as large as 128 GB.

At this point, using GDDR7 memory in Strix Halo APUs sounds dubious but future possible configurations or solutions might involve that type of memory. Additionally, AMD is set to use its latest RDNA graphics architecture in the upcoming Sony PlayStation 5 Pro, which is expected to feature a larger GPU and faster memory, possibly GDDR7, considering that current PS5 models use GDDR6.

PS5 Pro early leaks suggest a 45% performance gain in rasterized rendering from a larger GPU and faster memory The console will also boast improved ray tracing abilities, speeding up roughly 2-3x on average and peaking at around as much as 4 times faster. It will feature a custom machine learning architecture supporting 300 TOPS at 8-bit for PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), Sony’s version of Multi Frame Super Resolution based on the PlayStation Machine Learning (PSML) algorithm.

Moving on to its RDNA 4, which will power the next-generation Radeon RX 8000 GPUs from AMD would see memory sticking with GDDR6 in terms of pin-speeds up to around 20Gbps. The shift to GDDR7 memory is anticipated with the RDNA 5 series. While this remains speculative, the concept of a high-end APU with numerous GPU cores and on-package GDDR7 memory is exciting for providing enhanced, enthusiast-level gaming experiences.

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