The great thing about the Cambrian explosion in compute that has been forced by the end of Dennard scaling of clock frequencies and Moore’s Law lowering in the cost of transistors is not only that we are getting an increasing diversity of highly tuned compute engines and broadening SKU stacks across those engines, but also that we are getting many different interpretations of the CPU, GPU, DPU, and FPGA themes. …
UPDATED Like many HPC and AI system builders, we are impatient to see what the “Antares” Instinct MI300A hybrid CPU-GPU system on chip from AMD might look like in terms of performance and price. …
We were under the distinct impression that AMD was not going to talk much about its datacenter compute engines at the Consumer Electronics Show, having just launched its “Genoa” Epyc 9004 server CPUs in November with much fanfare. …
The old AMD – the one before Lisa Su took over – was often brilliant with its instruction set architecture and CPU designs, but sometimes perplexingly careless with its design choices and chip roadmaps. …
Sometimes, competing for business means coming up with better products than your rivals. …
In March 2020, when Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced the exascale “El Capitan” supercomputer contract had been awarded to system builder Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which was also kicking in its “Rosetta” Slingshot 11 interconnect and which was tapping future CPU and GPU compute engines from AMD, the HPC center was very clear that it would be using off-the-shelf, commodity parts from AMD, not custom compute engines. …
After its acquisitions of ATI in 2006 and the maturation of its discrete GPUs with the Instinct line from the past few years and the acquisitions of Xilinx and Pensando here in 2022, AMD is not just a second source of X86 processors. …
IT organizations, especially the key hyperscalers and cloud builders, don’t buy point products, they buy roadmaps. …
Imagine, if you will, that AMD could make as many Epyc CPUs and Instinct GPU accelerators as it wanted at a reasonable yield and cost. …
When the “Aldebaran” datacenter GPUs were launched by AMD last November for the HPC and AI crowd pushing up into the exascale stratosphere, only the two top-end models of the Instinct GPU accelerators –ones that use the Open Accelerator Module (OAM) form factor put forth by Facebook and Microsoft under the Open Compute Project – were actually available. …
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