An Update on the Rest of the Versal Premium Gen 2 Family
Besides today’s announcement of the memory on package versions of the Versal Premium Gen 2 chips, AMD is also offering a brief update on the status of the standard Versal Premium Gen 2 chips, which are still ramping up.
The standard Gen 2 chips are now sampling to customers. And these will go into mass production in the fourth quarter of 2026.
Meanwhile the shipping chips will offer a bit more functionality than AMD initially announced. Of note, AMD will be providing a third PCIe controller on the Premium Gen 2 chips, joining the previously announced pair of PCIe Gen6 x8 controllers. The third controller is a PCIe Gen5 x4 controller, and is meant in part to provide IP continuity with earlier Versal Premium chips.
Finally, the company is also introducing a Versal Premium Gen 2 chip with support for RDIMMs for customers who need the highest memory capacities. The 52.5mm x 55mm VSVA3224 package will be able to support up to 4 RDIMMs, allowing for all of the memory capacity and memory integrity benefits that a registered DIMM entails.
Final Words
The AI boom has touched virtually every corner of the computing ecosystem, and not always in ways we expect it to. AMD’s adaptive SoCs are far from the GPUs, CPUs, or accelerators that make up the core architecture of modern AI data centers, and yet they are a prime example of this effect. While the spike in demand has done wonders for AMD’s HBM-powered accelerators, it has come at the cost of their HBM-powered adaptive SoCs. And thus AMD is making a major pivot away from HBM and towards LPDDR5X for their memory on package products.
The end result is that AMD’s adaptive SoC lineup is going through an unexpected shuffle, but it is a change that will benefit both AMD and its customers in the long run. Besides ensuring the immediate continuity of AMD’s highly integrated chips for future generations of products, being able to offer chips with on-package memory for 15+ years will finally bring AMD’s memory on package adaptive SoCs on par with the longevity of their traditional chips, which was the Achilles heel of the HBM chips even before HBM demand shot through the roof.
Building off of AMD’s existing Versal Premium Gen 2 silicon, the forthcoming Versal Premium Gen 2 Memory on Package chips are ultimately a straightforward offering, but an important one for AMD nonetheless. It allows AMD to extend the reach of their high-end adaptive SoCs into products and form factors where the discrete chips would not be suitable, while also being able to court customers who do not want to lay out their own LPDDR5X memory buses.
The on-package memory chips will begin sampling in the fourth quarter of this year. Meanwhile full mass production will kick off in Q3 of 2027, with AMD projecting the chips to be available until at least 2042.
