The rumored leaks about its 256-bit bus bandwidth on the Big NAVI 21 is worrying to all the fans and early adopters as it doesn’t provide a lot of space for the GPU and the memory. But AMD’s Infinity cache might solve the low bandwidth problem of AMD’s Big NAVI.
AMD’s marketing is fully transparent. Previously they dubbed the L3 cache on the Ryzen processor as Game Cache. The Game Cache was just the average L3 cache, which significantly was revealed on the launch date.
AMD might go for the same marketing on the Radeon RX 6000 GPUs as well. Increasing the L3 cache size and calling it the Infinity Cache. But AMD did file a patent for its newer caching system.
Explaining it in layman’s terms, each of the GPU cores has its L1 cache. The L2 cache on the GPU is easily shared between all of the GPU cores. The new technology from AMD allows the L1 cache on the GPU to be shared among all the GPU cores removing the problems like a cache miss.
Making the L1 cache available for all the GPU cores allows even better processing and removing the need for larger memory bus bandwidth. Using a larger L3 cache is also possible, but it is relatively slow compared to L1 or L2 cache.
AMD filed a patent on the Adaptive Cache Reconfiguration Via Clustering last year, which might be the Infinity Cache system on the newer GPUs.The Infinity cache system allows the GPU to access each other’s L1 cache, eliminating data replication on each slice cache.
The new model has a 22% improved performance and is 49% energy efficient. This might solve the problem of the 256-bit bus on the card. The GPU’s faster-caching system helps compete with Nvidia top of the line RTX 3090 and RTX 3080.
The RTX 3090 has a memory bandwidth of 936.2 Gbps, whereas the RTX 3080 slacks behind with its 760.3 Gbps memory speed. The difference between the RTX 3090 and the RX 6000 is vastly seen. The supposed RX 6900XT came with 256-bit bus bandwidth.
The low bandwidth speed of the RX 6900XT was concerning as it was reported to face the RTX 3090. AMD is almost on the last leg preparing for the RX 6000 series GPU launch and will showcase on October 28.
The Infinity Cache might be a crack at Nvidia’s higher memory bandwidth. Until the GPU announcement, we are entirely unsure what AMD’s has up its sleeves.
