AMD's Executive Vice President Rick Bergman in an interview with The Street shed some light on the company's future plans for Zen 4 and RDNA 3, even as we are still reeling from (or coming in to) Zen 3 and RDNA 2's launches. Speaking on RDNA 3, Rick Bergman mentioned the company's commitment to achieve the same 50% performance-per-watt increase they achieved with RDNA 2, and had some interesting takes on the matter of why this is actually one of the most important metrics:

Rick BergmanIt just matters so much in many ways, because if your power is too high -- as we've seen from our competitors -- suddenly our potential users have to buy bigger power supplies, very advanced cooling solutions. And in a lot of ways, very importantly, it actually drives the [bill of materials] of the board up substantially. This is a desktop perspective. And invariably, that either means the retail price comes up, or your GPU cost has to come down. We focused on that for RDNA 2. It's a big focus on RDNA 3 as well.

Rick Bergman then went on to talk about how exactly AMD's Infinity Cache played a crucial role in achieving these performance-per-watt improvements: it's basically a way to prevent power consumption that results from the need to address VRAM and achieving higher memory bandwidths exclusively from larger buses or faster VRAM speeds:

Rick BergmanOn Infinity Cache, it's somewhat linked to that as well, to a certain degree. If you've been in graphics for a long time, you realize there's a pretty good correlation between memory bandwidth and performance. And so typically, the way you do it is you jack up your memory speed and widen your bus to open up performance. Unfortunately, both of those things drive up power.

On raytracing, Rick Bergman is confident on AMD's design goals, which were looking at the 1440p resolution as the performance target for high-quality raytracing effects - and doubles down on AMD's advantage of having its raytracing technology shipped with both next-generation consoles in the Xbox family and PS5.

Rick Bergman[1440p]…that was kind of the performance level that we targeted. Now it depends on particular games and everybody's systems and so on, but I think you'll find that we have very good raytracing performance overall. And the game support will be strong as we go through 2021, because again, we get that great leverage. It's just built in: You support raytracing on Microsoft or Sony [consoles], you're supporting AMD on the PC side as well."

On AMD's response to NVIDIA's DLSS, which the company is calling FSR/FidelityFX Super Resolution (which will be joining AMD's Contrast Adaptive Sharpening), Bergman underlined AMD's approach to an open standard, in opposition to a proprietary one, which would only require ISV adoption:

Rick BergmanWe don't have a lot of details that we want to talk about. So we called [our solution] FSR — FidelityFX Super Resolution. But we are committed to getting that feature implemented, and we're working with ISVs at this point. I'll just say AMD's approach on these types of technologies is to make sure we have broad platform support, and not require proprietary solutions [to be supported by] the ISVs. And that's the approach that we're taking. So as we go through next year, you'll get a lot more details on it.

Moving on to AMD's Zen 4, AMD is counting (naturally) on building upon the success of Zen 3, and Bergman thinks that the current state of x86 demands improvements in power efficiency and instructions per clock - which can be achieved across all areas of chip development, including core counts, frequency optimizations, and overall architecture revisions:

Rick Bergman[Given] the maturity of the x86 architecture now, the answer has to be, kind of, all of the above. If you looked at our technical document on Zen 3, it was this long list of things that we did to get that 19% [IPC uplift]. Zen 4 is going to have a similar long list of things, where you look at everything from the caches, to the branch prediction, [to] the number of gates in the execution pipeline. Everything is scrutinized to squeeze more performance out."

Naturally, the change in process node from current TSMC's 7 nm to the company's 5 nm process with Zen 4 will also factor-in on the performance-per-watt improvement, and the amount of logic that AMD can cram into the same puny die space as their current Zen 3 CPUs require. However, Bergman didn't clarify whether AMD's RDNA3 would also benefit from the 5 nm process transition that is all but set in stone for Zen 4:

Rick BergmanNothing to disclose at this time. GPUs are increasingly complex, they're very logic-based, so they do take advantage of the advanced process nodes. But CPUs love [them] for the reasons we were just talking about --- for the IPC and the frequency [gains]. So we look at our product lineup and where the technology is, and how we want to manage risk and kind of pick the right product at the right time. For a lot of reasons I mentioned, [CPUs and GPUs] tend to line up at fairly similar timeframes at the end of the day, because we want to take advantage. We also look at when our foundry is really going to be ready for the type of volumes in [the] quality that we demand. And we don't land in two different timescales.

It seems almost certain that AMD will prioritize the Zen 4 transition to a denser node rather than that of RDNA3, should they have to choose between one or the other. One need only look at CPU and GPU pricing and compare those with the overall die sizes to understand - put quite simply - that AMD achieves much higher margins on a n (estimated) 180 mm² - 250 mm² Ryzen 7 5800X for $449 (not to speak about the other, higher-priced CPU tiers) compared to the 536 mm² Radeon RX 6800 XT for $649.

Finally, Rick Bergman had this to say regarding Threadripper, which has been absent from AMD's talks on Zen 3:

Rick Bergman"I can't talk about unannounced products, but we're committed to the Threadripper family. And so you could certainly expect that we'll in the future continue to have products in that particular area. Absolutely."