Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) showcased its upcoming line of artificial intelligence (AI) processors, aiming to help data centers handle a crush of AI traffic and challenge Nvidia Corp’s dominance in the burgeoning market.
The company’s Instinct MI300 series is to include an accelerator that can speed up processing for generative AI — the technology used by ChatGPT and other chatbots, AMD said during a presentation in San Francisco on Tuesday.
The product, called MI300X, is part of a lineup that it unveiled in January at CES, formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show.
Photo: Reuters
Like much of the chip industry, AMD is racing to meet booming demand for AI computing. Popular services that rely on large language models — algorithms that crunch massive amounts of data to answer queries and generate images — are pushing data centers to the limit.
So far, Nvidia has had an edge in supplying the technology needed to handle these workloads.
“We are still very, very early in the life cycle of AI,” AMD CEO Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) said at the event.
The total addressable market for data center AI accelerators would rise fivefold to more than US$150 billion in 2027, Su said.
“It’s going to be a lot,” she added.
Executives from Amazon.com Inc’s AWS and Meta Platforms Inc joined Su on stage to talk about using AMD processors in their data centers. The chipmaker also announced the availability of the latest version of its Epyc server processors and a new variant called Bergamo aimed at cloud computing.
The MI300X accelerator is based on AMD’s CDNA 3 technology and uses as much as 192 gigabytes of memory to handle workloads for large language models and generative AI, the Santa Clara, California-based company said.
Key customers would start sampling the technology in the third quarter, with full production starting in the fourth, AMD said.
Another model, the Instinct MI300A, is going out to customers now, it said.
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