Future architectures for gpus amd will bring hardware with bfloat16

The new AMD graphics have brought the RDNA “Navi” micro-architecture to the field of play and their results are quite positive. However, this is not the last step the company plans to take. They say future AMD GPU architectures will bring support for BFloat16 hardware.

Future AMD GPU architectures will have hardware with BFloat16

The red team is planning to make a significant leap in micro-architectures to implement hardware support with BFloat16 . Compared to the current hardware that offers us support for FP16 , the improvement that we would suffer should be considerable.

The point is that some AMD ROCm libraries have been found on GitHub , which gives us pause to think how the company is doing on this front.

The BFloat16 instructions offer a much wider range over FP16 , which only go to 6.55 x 10 ^ 4 operations . This has forced certain Artificial Intelligence researchers to use the older FP32 technology , which is more inefficient, but more stable.

In BFloat16 we have 8 exponent bits, while FP16 only offers us 5 bits, which allows us to be more resistant to overflows and underflows in conversions to FP32 . An important part of this is because these future architectures are possibly FP32 based.

We can see this movement as an advance that will strengthen the foundations of AMD.

As for gaming, the changes we will see will be minimal, since the most common 3D rendering systems do not take advantage of this improvement. However, in the field of Artificial Intelligence we should notice a significant improvement.

Be that as it may, these rumors are not entirely official, so everything indicates that we will not know anything for a couple of months. Not surprisingly, now tell us: what do you expect from future AMD graphics? Do you think the company should bet higher?

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