AMD Leaks Next-Gen Zen 6 Medusa APU Graphics In Ray Tracing Update

AMD's HIP is its "Heterogeneous Interface for Portability". It's a library that functions similarly to NVIDIA's CUDA in that it provides runtime APIs for compute applications across multiple platforms, including CUDA itself. So there's a ray-tracing library for HIP, known as HIPRT, and it just got updated for the integrated graphics in AMD's upcoming Medusa APUs.

HIPRT isn't really meant for games; it's used for things like Blender and Maxon Redshift. That doesn't matter for the relevant part of this news, though, which is that the architecture numbers gfx1170, gfx1171, and gfx115E are all apparently related to the Medusa Zen 6 chip family. There's a fair bit we can extrapolate from those numbers, though it must be said that this all remains speculation for now.

AMD GPU architecture numbers aren't strictly related to performance, so we can't say anything about that, but this "gfx117x" is a new family of identifiers, not found in any current products. It's not strictly new in terms of leaks, though; "gfx1170" was first revealed way back in February, and gfx1171 (as well as a gfx1172 GPU not noted here) were revealed in August.

While the architecture numbers don't tell us about performance, they do tell an interesting story about these GPUs. GFX11 is the RDNA 3 architecture; the architecture number debuted with Navi 31, the GPU used in the Radeon RX 7900 XTX. GFX115x typically refers to the so-called "RDNA 3.5" architecture used in AMD's Strix Point and Strix Halo processors. So what is GFX11.7?

Earlier leaks identified GFX1170 as "RDNA 4m", and I suspect that what these gfx117x GPUs actually are is RDNA 3.5 with some specific RDNA 4 architectural features backported; if I were to take a domesticated guess, that might include FP8 and lower-precision FP4 support for improved AI performance and compatibility. With local AI being such an emphasis for AMD and Intel recently, it only makes sense to improve the AI compute capabilities of the mobile SoCs.

Meanwhile, gfx115E is an interesting one too. Being GFX11.5 it clearly belongs to the RDNA 3.5 architecture family, but we haven't seen an alphabetic character in a Radeon graphics architecture number in a minute. It's definitely novel, too, at least among consumer GPUs; AMD's HIPRT patch notes amusingly include this bugfix:

Way back in April of 2024, Chinese leaker Golden Pig Upgrade Pack claimed that AMD would carry RDNA 3.5 through to 2027 for its integrated graphics. Many groaned at the news, as RDNA 3 doesn't carry the most impressive feature set, neither for advanced graphics nor local AI. It looks like AMD has indeed carried RDNA 3.5 forward, but at least some of the Medusa GPUs will seemingly get a welcome architectural upgrade over Strix Point.