[News] AMD Unifies RDNA and CDNA into UDNA Architecture, Aiming to Compete with NVIDIA’s CUDA

According to a report from tom’s Hardware, Jack Huynh, AMD’s senior vice president and general manager of its Computing and Graphics Business Group, announced at IFA 2024 in Berlin that AMD will unify its consumer microarchitecture “RDNA” and data center microarchitecture “CDNA” under a single name: “UDNA.” This move is expected to compete with NVIDIA’s CUDA ecosystem.

Previously, AMD used the same architecture for both gaming and compute GPUs, known as “GCN.” However, since 2019, the company decided to split the microarchitectures into two distinct designs: RDNA for consumer gaming GPUs and CDNA for data center computing.

Reportedly, Jack Huynh stated that the consolidation into the unified “UDNA” architecture will make it easier for developers to work with, eliminating the need to choose between different architectures without added value.

When asked if future desktop GPUs will have the same architecture as the MI300X, Huynh mentioned that this is part of a strategy to unify from cloud to client. With a single team working on it, the company is making efforts to standardize, acknowledging that while there may be minor conflicts, it is the right approach.

While high-end chips can establish a market presence, the report from tom’s hardware further addressed that the ultimate success depends on software support. NVIDIA built a strong moat 18 years ago with its CUDA architecture, and one of its fundamental advantages is the “U” in CUDA, which stands for Unified.

NVIDIA’s single CUDA platform serves all purposes, using the same underlying microarchitecture for AI, HPC, and gaming.

Jack Huynh revealed that CUDA has around 4 million developers, and his goal is to pave the way for AMD to achieve similar success.

However, AMD relies on the open-source ROCm software stack, which depends on support from users and the open-source community. If AMD can simplify this process, even if it means optimizing for specific applications or games, it will help accelerate the ecosystem.

Read more

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(Photo credit: AMD)