What On Earth Is The Arcturus GPU Silicon And How Can The Architecture Be Used?

What On Earth Is The Arcturus GPU Silicon And How Can The Architecture Be Used?
Credit: PCGamesN via YouTube

A total of three new Linux patches has been released since Monday, July 15 aimed to help AMD’s Linux bods, the Arcturus GL-XL system. From a non-tech perspective, this type of GPU has been passed on for years now and is deemed to usher the new generation of graphics architecture for the AMD system. Considering that the AMD GPU direction has been planned out to go beyond 2020, these new 7nm-based Vega 20 products are expected to be on the rise in the coming years.

But what exactly is the Arcturus GPU Silicon, and how can it be used in the present form of our existing computer architecture? The Arcturus codename, to begin with, has been derived from the brightest red giant star n the Bootes constellation bordered by Virgo, Canes Venatici, Draco, and Ursa Major lying in the northern hemisphere. On the tech side, the Arcturus architecture has its similarities to the Vega and Navi only differing in its core capacities.

The recent changes brought three distinct additions to the PCI device, including different Arcturus range IDs entirely peculiar from each other. The Arcturus architecture also saw an improvement from its 62 to a whopping 128 Compute Units (CU), which also requires an increase in its Virtual CRAT. By any sense, we are talking about 7nm Vega-based GPUs which can have 128 CU within its hands or a possible score of 8,192 GCN.

These newly released Linux patches first appeared through the Phoronix-y type test suite and circulated around social media, most notably Twitter. Publicly discussed by the @KOMACI_ENSAKA people, this three architecture with new Vega 20-based GPU possibly might still be in the discourse. On the downside, speculations have also been circulating that the Arcturus infrastructure might not be a mega-7nm graphics chip because it does not have a 3D engine.

https://twitter.com/KOMACHI_ENSAKA/status/1150987504717193216

By every account and if this happens to be accurate, the Arcturus architecture might be purely a computing device having the Vega GCN computing capacity. AMD though, has not been clear about anything despite current GPU architecture using the Navi system. The existing Navi GPU architecture has a gaming-focused design, including Vega and the Graphics Core Next, which is still being used in the computation space.

With all these brouhahas coming out of social media, it still is not clear what the new AMD Arcturus GPU might be having and how it will differ from the existing technologies our systems are running on.

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