Artificial intelligence takes center stage this week, with announcements from AMD, some edge AI news and the introduction of Gemini. Among other updates, the recent funding increase to private semiconductor firms.
AMD MI300 to challenge Nvidia H100
At the recent “Advancing AI” event, AMD has launched multiple new AI products, including the Instinct MI300 Series data center AI accelerators, ROCm 6 open software stack, and Ryzen 8040 Series processors with Ryzen AI. The event was intended to showcase growing momentum for AMD-powered AI solutions, particularly in data centers; on the occasion Microsoft, Dell Technologies, HPE, Lenovo, Meta, Oracle, Supermicro and others announced their adoption of the new AMD Instinct MI300X and MI300A data center AI accelerators for training and inference solutions. Analysis website SemiAnalysis has provided a benchmark-by-benchmark comparison of AMD MI300 performance versus Nvidia H100 GPU, highlighting that some AMD results only apply to the “forward pass” processing step. However, in terms of performance – including the software stack, a key element to take advantage of raw hardware power – SemiAnalysis sees AMD “rapidly improving.” SemiAnalysis also highlighted that OpenAI plans to support AMD’s GPUs, including MI300, in the standard Triton distribution starting with the upcoming 3.0 release.
AMD joins the “AI PC” race
Besides Intel, AMD is also touting the “AI PC” concept – that is, adding AI capabilities to mainstream x86 PC processors. The new AMD Ryzen 8040 Series mobile processors feature an integrated Ryzen AI NPU on-die on select models, offering up to 1.6x more AI processing performance than prior AMD models. AMD is also making Ryzen AI3 Software available for users to build and deploy machine learning models on their AI PCs. Laptops with Ryzen AI can offload AI models to the NPU, thereby freeing up the CPU to reduce power consumption while extending battery life. AMD Ryzen 8040 Series processors are expected to be available from OEMs including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Razer, beginning in Q1 2024.
