In a bold move that has tech enthusiasts buzzing, AMD’s CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, has offered a sneak peek into the company’s future plans by hinting at the development of the Instinct MI400 series. This upcoming lineup of data-center accelerators is poised to succeed the recently unveiled MI300 series, and although the specifics remain shrouded in mystery, industry insiders are already abuzz with anticipation.
The Instinct MI300 series itself is a fusion of CDNA3 and Zen4 architectures, showcasing AMD’s relentless pursuit of innovation and performance optimization. Within this series, the MI300X emerges as a standout contender—a GPU-only accelerator engineered with a formidable 192GB of HBM3 memory. Its design is laser-focused on meeting the demands of large language models (LLMs) that thrive on substantial memory capacity and bandwidth.
A hallmark feature of the MI300 series is its remarkable versatility, achieved through cutting-edge die stacking technology. The MI300X shares its chiplet architecture with its counterpart, the MI300A, a data center APU characterized by the harmonious integration of Zen 4 CPU cores and CDNA3 GPU cores in a single package. The MI300A is custom-tailored for high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads, harnessing the advantages of a unified memory architecture and boasting 128GB of HBM3 memory.
While AMD and its partners have been tantalizingly quiet about the specific SKUs within the MI400 series, Dr. Lisa Su has boldly acknowledged the company’s ambitions during a recent Q2 earnings call. She stated,
“When you look across those workloads and the investments that we’re making, not just today, but going forward with our next-generation MI400 series and so on and so forth, we definitely believe that we have a very competitive and capable hardware roadmap. I think the discussion about AMD, frankly, has always been about the software roadmap, and we do see a bit of a change here on the software side.”
The Instinct MI400 series will mark the fifth generation of AMD’s accelerator offerings and continue the company’s shift away from the Radeon branding—a trend that became all the more evident with the integration of the Zen CPU architecture into the MI300 series. This move follows in the footsteps of the Arcturus-based MI200 series, which has already been deployed and is commercially available, as well as the eagerly anticipated MI300 (codenamed Aldebaran).
Whispers within tech circles hint that the MI400 might introduce an XSwitch interconnect technology, potentially positioning AMD in a more competitive stance against products based on NVIDIA’s NVLink interconnect technology.
As anticipation mounts for the next wave of AMD’s innovations, the technology world watches with bated breath to see how the MI400 series will elevate the realm of data-center acceleration and redefine the boundaries of computational prowess.
Source: SeekingAlpha, SemiAnalysis