AMD Advancing AI 2026: Talking CDNA5 with AMD’s Alan Smith

Hello you fine Internet folks, Today we are over AMD's Advancing AI 2026 event to chit chat on their newly revealed CDNA5 architecture with Alan Smith! AMD's Corporate Fellow and Chief Architect for Datacenter GPUs. Hope y'all enjoy!The transcript below has been edited for conciseness, readability, and clarifications.George: So, what do you do here at AMD?Alan: Yeah. So, I’m a Corporate Fellow of Graphics Architecture at AMD and responsible for Instinct GPU architecture, which we launched today in MI455 and Helios.George: Starting off, all the way down into the grunt of the engine of MI455. Prior CDNA architectures were based on the GCN architecture, which dates all the way back to Tahiti from I believe 2012, if memory serves, but with CDNA 5, you have now rebased to RDNA. What were some of the considerations for that rebasing of the architecture?Alan: Yeah, that's a great question. I think there were many, many considerations for making that transition, right? First of all, you know,…