AMD Publishes Documentation On RDNA 1.0 ISA

AMD has published their instruction set architecture documentation for their new RDNA 1.0 architecture found on their new Radeon RX 5700 series GPUs and other forthcoming products.

AMD quietly released their RDNA 1.0 ISA documentation on Thursday. The PDF covers 240 pages of the RDNA shader ISA in detail designed for driver writers, game engine developers, and others wanting to know the fine details to the new RDNA instruction set.

That document is dated for the launch day, 7 July, but the upload for making it public appears to have only been done on 1 August and so far we haven't seen much fuss about it.

AMD has been regularly publishing their ISA for new generations of their graphics processors. This is important for the likes of improving their AMDGPU shader compiler within LLVM or even Valve's ACO effort, among other use-cases. But this isn't to be confused with the full programming documentation that they have generally released in the past outlining various prominent registers for the hardware and other areas beyond just the shader ISA.

We generally haven't seen that complete programming documentation made public for recent generations due to the time/resources involved in making that public where as AMD's open-source developers have just been focused on improving their Linux driver code as the de facto reference, but we'll see if anything changes for Navi.