But analysts worry that no early adopter customers for the new chip have been announced.
At its “Data Center and AI Technology Premiere” this week, AMD announced their new Instinct MI300X accelerator. In addition, the company announced its supporting ROCm software ecosystem for data center accelerators alongside it. The new product line is designed to handle generative AI workloads that power such services as OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT.
Generative AI relies on Large Language Models (LLMs) to create human-like interactions and respond to queries conversationally. LLMs are very data intensive and require a lot of computing power to implement.
Nvidia currently dominates the generative AI chip landscape, with a massive market share of between 80% and 95%, according to analysts. With the introduction of the Instinct product line, AMD is hoping to get a foothold in that market.
AMD sees “strategic growth” in AI
Indeed, AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su said that “AI is the defining technology shaping the next generation of computing and the largest strategic growth opportunity for AMD”. She added that AMD is “laser focused on accelerating the deployment of AMD AI platforms at scale in the data center”. In addition, she claims AMD is supported by a “growing ecosystem of enterprise-ready AI software optimized for our hardware”.
The MI300X is based on the next-gen AMD CDNA 3 accelerator architecture and supports up to 192 GB of HBM3 memory. This should provide the compute and memory efficiency needed for large language model training and inference for generative AI workloads, AMD explained in a press release.
The chip hardware is also supported by the company’s new ROCm software ecosystem for data center accelerators. The integration of the MIX300 series accelerators and ROCm “empowers developers with an extensive array of AI models powered by PyTorch that are compatible and ready to use ‘out of the box’ on AMD accelerators”, the company said.
Following the announcement, SiliconANGLE noted that AMD’s stock was “down more than 3% on what analysts said was a lack of any major customer announcements regarding the MI300X”. AMD usually showcases big companies that will be early adopters of its new hardware, but failed to do so for the Instinct launch. The company also didn’t provide pricing information for the MI300X.