Many months ago, there was talk about the possibility of AMD opting for multi-chip designs for its products based on the Navi architecture, an approach that would allow the company greater flexibility in the design of its products, although this will not be the case in the end.
GPUs are large and complex chips, which makes the performance of manufacturing processes lower than they would be with smaller and simpler chips. This led to the idea of AMD opting for a multichip design for its Navi architecture, which would allow it to manufacture small chips and then combine them to achieve high performance. This idea would lower the manufacturing cost, as more functional chips can be obtained per silicon wafer.
David Wang, the new senior vice president of engineering for AMD’s Radeon Technologies Group (RTG), has clarified that Navi GPUs will continue to be based on a traditional monolithic design, as the gaming world does not have software that enables a multi-chip module. That infrastructure doesn’t exist with graphics cards outside of CrossFire and SLI, and even that kind of multi-GPU support is decreasing to the point where it’s virtually dead. Game developers don’t want to spend the resources needed to encode their games specifically to work with a multi-GPU matrix with a tiny installation base, and that would be the same with an MCM design.
So, for now, we won’t see a multi-chip design from AMD in the gaming world, with the exception of two-core graphics cards, although it’s been a while since the last one.