Originally posted by coder
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But your two-cards scenario reminds me of their chiplet approach and brings me to the idea (which was brought up years ago in one of AdoredTV's famous speculation videos) of a combined APU + CDNA/RDNA solution, possibly with HBM on-package (the dGPU would come with its own for more capacity). Of course having (one or several) GPU chiplet(s) on the CPU would also enable more flexibility, even seperate RDNA- and CDNA-based APUs which you could couple with either RDNA- or CDNA-based dGPUs. I can envision a low-level interconnect and protocols like CXL to enable this. Maybe even an RDNA-APU could work with a CDNA-dGPU (or vice versa) together and could be used for gaming, as one of them would have the display and fixed-function hardware and could make use of the compute power of the other. Also it would be more economical for AMD as they would need to design a CPU chiplet and two GPU chiplets only to conquer all of these markets with mixed, matched and scaled up products based on these. That would indeed be very clever, if they can get it to work. The software support could be a big problem though, at least on the consumer side, as games would need to know how to optimally balance their workloads between all involved devices, hopefully in a transparent way without explicit support of developers. But maybe games would need to make more use of compute instead of graphics? What do you think of these thoughts?
P.S: Just as a sidenote, as far as I understand it Nvidia's new Crypto line uses salvaged desktop chips (from two seperate generations even?), that seems to me as a seperation on the marketing level only (with the usual driver/vbios/chip level cuts), but nothing as dramatic as a distinct architecture.
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