AMD’s chief technology officer, Mark Papermaster, said at the conference that the company’s next-generation Instinct MI300 acceleration processing unit for data center and high-performance computing is already in production in AMD’s labs. said. The APU uses AMD’s Zen 4 and CDNA 3 architectures and in 2024 it will power two El Capitan supercomputers that are expected to break the ExaFLOPS barrier.
“But with what we’ve announced and deployed with our next-generation Instinct, the MI300, which is already back in the lab, it’s a true data center APU.” Said (opens in new tab) Paper Master at Wells Fargo 2022 TMT Summit (via) Seeking Alpha (opens in new tab)). “Leveraging the Infinity architecture to fully coherently share the same memory is the CPU and GPU acceleration, all sharing high-bandwidth memory.”
AMD’s Instinct MI300 is a multi-chiplet APU with Zen 4 general-purpose x86 cores and CDNA 3-based compute GPUs, sharing a unified on-package memory pool consisting of Infinity cache and HBM. AMD will use TSMC’s N5 (5nm class) manufacturing process to produce CPU/GPU chiplets for his MI300, but the company has yet to reveal how many CPU cores and GPU stream processors the hybrid processor will have. not to
Combining CPU cores and GPU accelerators in one package with unified memory is the holy grail of supercomputing. This not only combines the best of both worlds (general-purpose processing and highly parallel acceleration), it also dramatically simplifies programming and makes it easier to extract the full performance potential from the execution engine.
The Instinct MI300 APU is set to power the U.S. Department of Energy’s El Capitan supercomputer, which will be installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in 2023 and fully operational in mid-2024.
AMD plans to roll out the Instinct MI300 in 2023. So it’s no surprise that the processor is already up and running in the lab. Meanwhile, it’s unclear if the company will supply the MI300 in large quantities to clients outside the supercomputer world next year.
AMD’s Instinct MI300 will be the industry’s first data center and HPC grade APU, and will be of great interest to the supercomputing community. AMD’s Instinct MI300, on the other hand, isn’t the only hybrid processor for the data center with x86 and GPU resources coming in the next few years. Intel, for example, is working on a product codenamed Falcon Shores with x86 cores and his Xe-HPC cores in the same package, expected to be available in 2024.
