AMD Announces Instinct MI200 Series Accelerators and More
During the virtual Accelerated Data Center Premiere, AMD launched the all-new AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators and delivered a preview of the 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors with AMD 3D V-Cache. The company also revealed some new information about its next-generation Zen 4 processor core and announced the new Zen 4c processor core. Additionally, AMD has managed to score a deal with Meta as the parent company of Facebook adopts AMD EPYC CPUs to power its data centers.
Codenamed "Milan-X", the 3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs with AMD 3D V-Cache will offer a 50% average performance uplift across targeted technical computing workloads. They will have the same capabilities and features as the original 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors and will be drop-in compatible with a BIOS upgrade. The CPUs are expected to launch in the first quarter of 2022.
Built on the AMD CDNA 2 architecture, the AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators can provide leading application performance for a wide range of HPC workloads. A member of the family, the AMD Instinct MI250X accelerator is capable of delivering up to 4.9 times better performance than competitive accelerators for double precision (FP64) HPC applications and surpasses 380 teraflops of peak theoretical half-precision (FP16) for AI workloads.
The key features of the AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators include:
AMD CDNA 2 architecture: 2nd Gen Matrix Cores accelerating FP64 and FP32 matrix operations, delivering up to 4 times the peak theoretical FP64 performance compared to AMD's previous-generation GPUs.
Leadership Packaging Technology: Industry-first multi-die GPU design with 2.5D Elevated Fanout Bridge (EFB) technology delivers 1.8 times more cores and 2.7 times higher memory bandwidth vs. AMD previous-gen GPUs, offering the industry’s best aggregate peak theoretical memory bandwidth at 3.2 terabytes per second.
3rd Gen AMD Infinity Fabric Technology: Up to 8 Infinity Fabric links connect the AMD Instinct MI200 with 3 rd Gen EPYC CPUs and other GPUs in the node to enable unified CPU/GPU memory coherency and maximise system throughput, allowing for an easier on-ramp for CPU codes to tap the power of accelerators.
The next-generation AMD EPYC processors are codenamed Genoa and Bergamo. Genoa is expected to be the world's highest performance processor for general-purpose computing, featuring up to 96 high-performance Zen 4 cores produced on optimised 5 nm technology. It will support DDR5 RAM and PCIe 5.0, as well as CXL. It will launch in 2022. On the other hand, Bergamo is a high-core count CPU designed for cloud-native applications, featuring 128 high-performance Zen 4c cores. It is socket compatible with Genoa and will be available in the first half of 2023.