AMD announces unified UDNA GPU architecture: combines RDNA and CDNA to compete against CUDA

Back in 2020, AMD announced it was splitting its post-GCN architecture into RDNA for gaming, with CDNA for its data center GPUs, with CDNA later being the architecture of its Radeon Instinct AI accelerators... and now, they're merging into UDNA.

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In a chat with Tom's Hardware, senior vice president and general manager of the Computing and Graphics Business Group of AMD, Jack Huynh, said: "So, part of a big change at AMD is today we have a CDNA architecture for our Instinct data center GPUs and RDNA for the consumer stuff. It's forked. Going forward, we will call it UDNA. There'll be one unified architecture, both Instinct and client (consumer). We'll unify it so that it will be so much easier for developers versus today, where they have to choose and value is not improving".

AMD simplifying into the UDNA architecture means we'll see a future where developers only need to focus on a single system, no matter if they're building next-gen AI GPU architectures, or next-gen GPU architectures for Radeon in the form of RDNA 5 in the future.

AMD is now planning 3 entire generations ahead: RDNA 5, UDNA 6, and UDNA 7 with a goal of maintaining optimizations without requiring a reset reach time AMD changes its memory hierarchy... some positive changes for the GPU business inside of AMD.

There is no UDNA plan rolled out to the public by AMD yet, so we don't know if this fusion of its GPU architectures will start with RDNA 5... but it would be the perfect point to start this new venture. RDNA 4 will only be aimed at the mid-range on the consumer Radeon GPU side, with a clean-sheet "Zen moment" with RDNA 5... UDNA sounds perfect for that. Let's go, AMD.