The new series of accelerators is claimed to be the first multi-die GPU and the first to support 128GB of HBM2e memory
AMD launches the AMD Instinct MI200 series of GPU accelerators. (Credit: Raysonho @ Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine / Wikipedia.org)
US-based semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has unveiled its first exascale-class graphics processing unit (GPU) accelerators dubbed as AMD Instinct MI200.
The new series of accelerators features the AMD Instinct MI250X, which the company claims is the fastest high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator in the world.
According to AMD, the AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators are built on AMD CDNA 2 architecture. The new GPU accelerators are said to be designed to deliver top application performance for a wide range of HPC workloads.
Combined with 3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs and the ROCm 5.0 open software platform, the new series of GPU accelerators are designed to drive new discoveries for the exascale era and address the most demanding challenges ranging from climate change to vaccine research, said AMD.
The company further stated that the new series of accelerators is claimed to be the first multi-die GPU and the first to support 128GB of HBM2e memory to offer a significant boost for applications critical to the foundation of science.
AMD revealed that the AMD Instinct MI250X accelerator drives performance that is up to 4.9 times better than competitive accelerators for double precision (FP64) HPC applications. Furthermore, it can cross 380 teraflops of peak theoretical half-precision (FP16) for artificial intelligence (AI) workloads to facilitate disruptive approaches in further expediting data-driven research, said the semiconductor firm.
The AMD Instinct MI250X accelerator will be used by the Frontier supercomputer, which is being designed by AMD in partnership with the US Department of Energy, HPE, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
AMD data centre and embedded solutions business group senior vice president and general manager Forrest Norrod said: “AMD Instinct MI200 accelerators deliver leadership HPC and AI performance, helping scientists make generational leaps in research that can dramatically shorten the time between initial hypothesis and discovery.
“With key innovations in architecture, packaging and system design, the AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators are the most advanced data centre GPUs ever, providing exceptional performance for supercomputers and data centres to solve the world’s most complex problems.”
Another GPU accelerator that has been unveiled under the AMD Instinct MI200 series is the MI250, which comes with 208 compute units and 13,312 stream processors.
Both AMD Instinct MI250X and AMD Instinct MI250 have been made available by AMD in the open-hardware compute accelerator module or OCP Accelerator Module (OAM) form factor.
In another development, AMD said that social technology company Meta (formerly Facebook) has adopted its AMD EPYC CPUs. The two firms are said to have collaborated to define an open, cloud-scale, single-socket server, based on the 3rd Gen EPYC processor.