Could AMD Be Working On A Next-Gen APU With Onboard GDDR7 Memory?

Could AMD Be Working On A Next-Gen APU With Onboard GDDR7 Memory? 1

A recent listing at NBD seems to point out an upcoming chip that has GDDR7 memory as part of the CPU, pointing to a potential AMD APU.

Recently, a new entry has been made at the logistics and shipping database, NBD, which lists the latest GDDR7 memory from Micron as part of the CPU. This is quite interesting since GDDR7 DRAM almost doubles the bandwidth over GDDR6 memory and will be the standard used for next-gen of GPUs, especially from NVIDIA and its Blackwell-based RTX 50 series.

A few months ago, Micron made its GDDR7 memory official, featuring 32 Gbps speeds & delivering up to 1.5 TB/s of bandwidth while offering a 30% improvement in game performance at various PC resolutions. The memory is also designed for AI at the Edge and AI PC platforms such as SOCs that are going to be a huge battleground for chipmakers such as AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Qualcomm & Apple in the coming years.

AMD itself has been the leader in the "AI PC" SOC space so far, delivering the first NPU on an AI chip with its "Phoenix" APUs and further refining it in Hawk Point APUs and the follow-up, Strix, which offers up to 55 TOPS of AI compute. AMD is also working on its next-gen Strix Halo APUs which will implement a chiplet design offering up to 16 Zen 5 cores and 40 RDNA 3.5 GPU cores.

Such a large amount of GPU cores requires a lot of bandwidth and while AMD's Strix Halo chips do implement an onboard LLC solution in the form of 32 MB MALL, they will require more bandwidth to sustain the high-performance throughput of the integrated GPU. The chips will also feature up to LPDDR5X-8533 memory support which should provide a decent bandwidth uplift. So far, there have been no reports of these chips featuring an on-package memory solution but they are listed with up to 128 GB capacities.

While it is unlikely that we might see GDDR7 memory integrated into Strix Halo APUs, we might see a specific configuration or a future solution that packages this memory type. AMD will also be using its latest RDNA graphics architecture for Sony PlayStation 5 Pro consoles which are expected to be unveiled soon. Early leaks have indicated a larger GPU and faster memory and considering GDDR6 is used in PlayStation 5 models, the next logical step should be to utilize GDDR7. Our gaming team has a good roundup of all the leaks for the PS5 Pro architecture as listed below:

45% performance improvement in rasterized rendering thanks to a larger GPU and faster memory

Hugely improved ray tracing architecture delivering 2-3x speedup on average, with peaks of 4x

Custom machine learning architecture that supports 300 TOPS at 8-bit to power the PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) upscaling technique, Sony's version of Multi Frame Super Resolution based on the PlayStation Machine Learning (PSML) algorithm.

PSSR is an ML-enhanced version of Temporal Anti-Aliasing Upscaling (TAAU) that requires inputs similar to NVIDIA DLSS or AMD FSR and fully supports High Dynamic Range (HDR) pipelines. It also does not require per-game training like the latest version of DLSS.

It should be pointed out that for its next-gen RDNA 4 "Radeon RX 8000" GPUs, AMD will still leverage the existing GDDR6 memory standard with up to 20 Gbps pin speeds. It is only until the RDNA 5 series that we will see the red team utilize the newer GDDR7 memory standards.

Now all of this is just a theory at this point but it will be cool to see a high-end APU with lots of GPU cores with on-package GDDR7 memory to enable faster enthusiast gaming experiences.