AMD's new chiplet GPU patent could finally do for graphics cards what Ryzen did for its CPUs
A little over a week ago, an AMD patent titled Distributed Geometry was published by the US Patent Office, the patent itself was filed by AMD in April this year. The patent details a fully chiplet approach to GPUs, where the rendering workload is distributed across a collection of chips, rather than having one massive die handling all of the processing. There's no indication that we'll see this employed in a Radeon graphics card any time soon, of course, but it's the natural evolution of what we've already seen in RDNA 3.
I picked up news of the patent from YouTube channel RedGamingTech and it's a fascinating read. Although the document is titled 'Distributed Geometry', it's really about distributed rendering. Take AMD's current Navi 31 GPU, its largest graphics processor as used in the Radeon RX 7900 series. That does use chiplets but these only contain two VRAM interfaces and a slice of L3 Infinity Cache; the rest of the GPU resides in a single block (called the GCD, graphics compute die).
As with all GPUs, there is a central workload processor that sends out rendering tasks to one of the many blocks of shaders within the chip. Each unit is given a piece of geometry to crunch through, convert into pixels, and then shade them. It's been done like this for decades and both AMD and Nvidia have near-perfected the process in their GPUs.
What AMD's patent details is an approach where that central processor is abandoned and the single chunk of silicon is replaced by a number of chiplets, where each one handles its own tasks. Rendering instructions are sent to GPUs in a long sequence called a command list and amongst it all are things called draw calls.
These are instructions for taking a bunch of geometry (i.e. triangles in
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