After focusing on the mid-range with the RDNA 4 generation, AMD may well relaunch itself.
The question is becoming more concrete as time goes by. At the beginning of the year, AMD launched its next-generation graphics cards, based on RDNA 4 architecture, and, as expected, these models were not designed to compete with NVIDIA at the top end of the market. This raises the question of AMD's future direction, as the American company looks ahead to the launch of the next generation. The first surprise is that, while some thought that RDNA 4 would be AMD's last before returning to a centralized design of architectures, merging CDNA and RDNA, it would seem that things are a little more complex.
A well-known informant in graphics card circles has indeed explained on the AnandTech forums that the RDNA 5 architecture is well and truly on the way at AMD. Going by the name Kepler_L2, the informant signed a reply insisting on the RDNA 5 denomination, before going on to give the supposed technical specifications of the most powerful model in the future range.
RDNA 4 and the 25th anniversary of the Radeon brand © AMD
In the jargon, we speak of a flagship, and in the case of RDNA 5, this flagship could be particularly muscular: we're talking about 96 computing units and a 384-bit memory interface bus. Remember that this type of memory interface is only used by NVIDIA on one of its most powerful graphics cards, the GeForce RTX 5080. In fact, if the characteristics put forward by Kepler_L2 are confirmed, this would clearly mean that AMD intends to get back into the race with its long-standing rival. It should be noted in passing that the Radeon RX 9070 XT - the most powerful of the RDNA 4 cards - has only 64 processing units and its memory interface bus is limited to 256-bit.
Of course, it's worth bearing in mind that we're only at the rumor stage here, despite Kepler_L2's good reputation, which, by the way, indicates that we're only talking about " preliminary elements ". We're still a long way from proven chips. What's more, even if these hints seem to indicate a possible return of AMD to the high-end, there would be no question of competing with NVIDIA on the very high-end. At NVIDIA, this segment is represented by the GeForce RTX 5090, a monster priced at over 2,000 euros, which uses a 512-bit memory interface bus, giving it an unrivalled bandwidth of 1.79 TB/s.
