One might question why an RX 9070 card would need so much memory, but increased capacity can serve purposes beyond gaming, such as Large Language Model (LLM) support for AI workloads. Additionally, it’s worth noting that RX 9070 cards will use 20 Gbps memory, much slower than the RTX 50 series, which features 28-30 Gbps GDDR7 variants. So, while capacity may increase, bandwidth likely won’t.
I misread this part, thinking you implied a bus width increase is necessary.
For a 512 bit memory bus, AMD would either have to use 1+8 dies if they follow the 7900XTX scheme or have a monolithic behemoth like GB102. The former would have increased power draw but lower manufacturing costs, while the latter is more power efficient and more prone to defects as it’s getting close to the aperture size limit.
I’d guess nvidia will soon have to switch to chiplet based GPUs. Maybe AMD stopped (for now?) because not their whole product stack was using chiplet based designs so they had way less flexibility with allocation and binning than with ryzen chiplets.
Has monolithic Vs chiplet been confirmed for 9070? A narrow buswidth on a much smaller (compared to previous I/O-die) technology would mean a whole lot in regards to surface area available for the stream processors.