AMD Linux Driver points to 'RDNA 4' coming soon, and the Radeon team moving on from RDNA 3

Rumors are pointing to AMD launching its next-generation RDNA 4 GPUs later this year, with the new flagship Radeon RX 8000 Series card set to be a mid-range offering that will deliver Radeon RX 7900 XTX performance for a fraction of the cost. A potential game-changer that could leave the high-end enthusiast market to NVIDIA alone with the arrival of the GeForce RTX 5090 and GeForce RTX 5080 coming at some point.

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Today comes a new article from the Linux-focused publication Phoronix and Michael Larabel, who spotted some interesting new updates for AMD Graphics on Linux. As Radeon drivers on Linux are open-source, these "updated IP (intellectual property) blocks within the open-source AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver" are tailor-made for RDNA 4.

Additionally, the amount of work being carried out for these new "blocks" covering GPU tasks points to AMD's engineers going all in on RDNA 4 (or GFX12) and moving on from iterating and optimizing RDNA 3.

The new patch/update enables ATHUB 4.1, LSDMA 7.0, IH 7.0, and HDP 7.0. The updates are technical, so here's Michael Larabel breaking down what these "blocks" do.

"ATHUB 4.1 is needed for clock-gating / power management features, LSDMA 7.0 is the latest IP for Light SDMA for general purpose System DMA (SDMA) on the GPU, IH 7.0 for the Interrupt Handler on the GPU, and HDP 7.0 for the Host Data Path support for CPU accessing the GPU device memory via the PCI BAR. As far as code changes, the big chunks of the work are from the auto-generated header files."

These updates could end up in the upcoming Linux 6.9 release later this year - indicating that RDNA 3 and Radeon RX 8000 Series GPUs are on track for this year.