AMD Expands AI/HPC Product Lineup With Flagship GPU-only Instinct Mi300X with 192GB Memory
Alongside their EPYC server CPU updates, as part of today's AMD Data Center event, the company is also offering an update on the status of their nearly-finished AMD Instinct MI300 accelerator family. The company's next-generation HPC-class processors, which use both Zen 4 CPU cores and CDNA 3 GPU cores on a single package, have now become a multi-SKU family of XPUs.
Joining the previously announced 128GB MI300 APU, which is now being called the MI300A, AMD is also producing a pure GPU part using the same design. This chip, dubbed the MI300X, uses just CDNA 3 GPU tiles rather than a mix of CPU and GPU tiles in the MI300A, making it a pure, high-performance GPU that gets paired with 192GB of HBM3 memory. Aimed squarely at the large language model market, the MI300X is designed for customers who need all the memory capacity they can get to run the largest of models.
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What is AMD's latest chip that has been unveiled?
First announced back in June of last year, and detailed in greater depth back at CES 2023, the AMD Instinct MI300 is AMD's big play into the AI and HPC market. The unique, server-grade APU packs both Zen 4 CPU cores and CDNA 3 GPU cores on to a single, chiplet-based chip. None of AMD's competitors have (or will have) a combined CPU+GPU product like the MI300 series this year, so it gives AMD an interesting solution with a truly united memory architecture, and plenty of bandwidth between the CPU and GPU tiles.
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What are the other applications that the chip could be used for?
MI300 also includes on-chip memory via HBM3, using 8 stacks of the stuff. At the time of the CES reveal, the highest capacity HBM3 stacks were 16GB, yielding a chip design with a maximum local memory pool of 128GB. However, thanks to the recent introduction of 24GB HBM3 stacks, AMD is now going to be able to offer a version of the MI300 with 50% more memory - or 192GB. Which, along with the additional GPU chiplets found on the MI300X, are intended to make it a powerhouse for processing the largest and most complex of LLMs.
Under the hood, MI300X is actually a slightly simpler chip than MI300A. AMD has replaced MI300A's trio of CPU chiplets with just two CDNA 3 GPU chiplets, resulting in a 12 chiplet design overall - 8 GPU chiplets and what appears to be another 4 IO memory chiplets. Otherwise, despite excising the CPU cores (and de-APUing the APU), the GPU-only MI300X looks a lot like the MI300A. And clearly, AMD is aiming to take advantage of the synergy in offering both an APU and a flagship CPU in the same package.
The MI300 family remains on track to ship at some point later this year. According to AMD, the 128GB MI300A APU is already sampling to customers now. Meanwhile the 192GB MI300X GPU will be sampling to customers in Q3 of this year.
Alongside today's 192GB MI300X news, AMD is also briefly announcing what they are calling the AMD Infinity Architecture Platform. This is an 8-way MI300X design, allowing for up to 8 of AMD's top-end GPUs to be interlinked together to work on larger workloads.
AMD is calling the Infinity Architecture Platform an "industry-standard" design. Accoding to AMD, they're using an OCP server platform as their base here; and while this implies that MI300X is using an OAM form factor, we're still waiting to get explicit confirmation of this.