AMD Launches AI Chip To Rival Nvidia's Blackwell (cnbc.com) 30
AMD is launching a new chip to rival Nvidia's upcoming Blackwell chips, which Nvidia called the "world's most powerful chip" for AI when unveiled earlier this year. CNBC reports: The Instinct MI325X, as the chip is called, will start production before the end of 2024, AMD said Thursday during an event announcing the new product. If AMD's AI chips are seen by developers and cloud giants as a close substitute for Nvidia's products, it could put pricing pressure on Nvidia, which has enjoyed roughly 75% gross margins while its GPUs have been in high demand over the past year. In the past few years, Nvidia has dominated the majority of the data center GPU market, but AMD is historically in second place. Now, AMD is aiming to take share from its Silicon Valley rival or at least to capture a big chunk of the market, which it says will be worth $500 billion by 2028.
AMD didn't reveal new major cloud or internet customers for its Instinct GPUs at the event, but the company has previously disclosed that both Meta and Microsoft buy its AI GPUs and that OpenAI uses them for some applications. The company also did not disclose pricing for the Instinct MI325X, which is typically sold as part of a complete server. With the launch of the MI325X, AMD is accelerating its product schedule to release new chips on an annual schedule to better compete with Nvidia and take advantage of the boom in AI chips. The new AI chip is the successor to the MI300X, which started shipping late last year. AMD's 2025 chip will be called MI350, and its 2026 chip will be called MI400, the company said.
AMD didn't reveal new major cloud or internet customers for its Instinct GPUs at the event, but the company has previously disclosed that both Meta and Microsoft buy its AI GPUs and that OpenAI uses them for some applications. The company also did not disclose pricing for the Instinct MI325X, which is typically sold as part of a complete server. With the launch of the MI325X, AMD is accelerating its product schedule to release new chips on an annual schedule to better compete with Nvidia and take advantage of the boom in AI chips. The new AI chip is the successor to the MI300X, which started shipping late last year. AMD's 2025 chip will be called MI350, and its 2026 chip will be called MI400, the company said.
Re:Too Bad AMD's Driver Support Sucks Big Time (Score:4, Interesting)
I tried to support AMD's open source strategy but ROCm was always their redheaded stepchild.
There's a reason CUDA won the contest and it's not because nVidia did everything they could do to support developers, but they did enough.
One could argue that understaffing the ROCm team cost AMD hundreds of billions.
IIRC last I saw their comms they had ten team members worldwide, two of whom worked on linux and maybe a half-timer too?
That was a while ago but it was a critical time.
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They're worth what $200,000,000. They should have 5 fulltime pytorch, 5 tensorflow, and 5 jax devs. And 20 in the general team to move around between that, onnx and a few other bits.
And maybe 20 more on the driver team so enogh ROCm works on even old consumer cards so that the packages just work.
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Haha you know I thought it didn't look quite right when I was writing it, but that's what comes of posting before coffee.
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And what would those cards be? Also are you aware of what MI-series products are and what they do? Sounds like you had a farm full of Radeon VII or something...
Vega cards were way ahead of nVidia (Score:5, Informative)
Especially the FP64 performance made those AMD cards run circles around any nVidia card for years.
The FP64 performance was at least double compared to nVidia cards released in that period.
They already had HBM2 memory while nVidia was still using DDR6 memory so that made also quite a difference.
AMD would be much popular if they had not tried to save some pennies on their driver support.
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The issues with video card shortages due to mining are a big reason why AMD split their graphics division between RDNA and CDNA. By having RDNA as a dedicated gaming line, those cards were less popular for mining and other compute focused applications. CDNA being the compute focused line. Now, in the long run, that ended up being a bit of a mistake since that prevented Radeon cards from selling to the non-gaming crowd as a way to get sales volumes up, even if AMD would remain behind in gaming. Still
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So it WAS Radeon VII. Yeah those were consumer/prosumer cards, and they didn't even get the pro driver stack that the VegaFE got (which was a disaster, the mode switching never worked right). I have a Radeon VII right now, in this machine I'm still using. It's a nice card! But it's an orphan from an older era of Radeon.
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Eh what? Datacenter-grade Radeon VII? Kinda curious about that.
In any case you're dealing with something from before the RDNA/CDNA split so no surprises there.
Also who exactly sold you that server?
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Heard it all before (Score:2)
>> AMD is historically in second place. Now, AMD is aiming to take share from its Silicon Valley rival
They've been saying that with every next release for decades, yet all they ever do is win is on bang for buck, never outright high end performance.
Also, even after decades, the reliability and stability of AMDs drivers still suck compared to nVidia's.
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Also, even after decades, the reliability and stability of AMDs drivers still suck compared to nVidia's.
The mainlined linux driver is fine, it was driver support that got me to switch from nvidia to ati well over a decade ago.
In the 3080/6800 generation performance was on par and I could have bought either, but 6800 had less headaches and longer support being in mainline.
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The windows drivers are trash. My Windows 10 laptop with AMD APU was having video driver crashes out of the box. Installed Linux, the OSS video driver works great.
If that's what you meant, sure.
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The drivers that come from Microsoft tend to be well behind, but my own Ryzen 2600H based laptop has never had a video driver crash, except when a Windows Update changed the drivers on me, and reverting to the latest AMD drivers(which Microsoft replaced) fixed the issues. Note that the AMD A series from before Ryzen also didn't give me many issues, but those are from a previous era. I've seen a fair number of NVIDIA driver crashes over the years too.
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Sure, I've had nvidia driver problems, but this was ridiculous. And it wasn't a Windows-bundled driver. It was preinstalled, but it was the full AMD driver. Open box, plug in laptop, log in, driver crash. Hadn't even used 3d.
The OSS driver is good AFAICT, the commercial driver is bad, AMD is bad at software in general. Too bad, because I am a dedicated AMD CPU user. In fact I just ordered up some new old stuff to upgrade my cheap PC to a newer cheap PC, I am going from a 1600 AF (Pinnacle Ridge 6 core) on a
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MI300 sold really well and made them a lot of money. Where's the problem?
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What card did they drop support for?
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Probably some consumer/prosumer cards. I'm guessing VegaFE, maybe Radeon VII.
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They aren't going to drop support for MI300. The kind of systems that run MI300 would not bother with driver upgrades if they did.
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Second place for decades sounds pretty good, as long as they're not bleeding money.
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Linux user here. And yeah, I know I am in the minority, but on Linux the driver issue is just the opposite. The amdgpu driver runs just great, with perfect stability and great performance, while the nvidia drivers have great performance but cause all kind of problems...
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Re: Heard it all before (Score:2)
Got to agree. My amd video with OSS drivers may be a bit older and not amazing performance, but it's rock solid. nVidia drivers cause constant issues on my other machine (good lord, Wayland is a disaster, I went back to Xorg).
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"Also, even after decades, the reliability and stability of AMDs drivers still suck compared to nVidia's."
No idea what the fuck you are talking about. The only time I changed my driver was when a particular game recommended a more recent version for better results. Or when I now require capabilities I didn't use before, such as hardware video encoding/streaming. Else I go half decades without touching it.
And I don't have to log online to change my drivers settings. But keep supporting a company that lies ab
Another fake paper launch (Score:2)
"launches" or "unveiled" but also mentions that production - not shipping will start before year end.
The article also reads a lot like an advertisement, would be more interesting if we saw a journalist who had an opportunity to do a Q&A instead of just repeating a press release.