Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.’s (AMD) Radeon Instinct MI Is an AI Powerhouse

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Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMD) is not slowing down whatsoever with its new product releases. Just two days ago, the company was making headlines with its Epyc processors, aimed directly at Intel Corporation’s (NASDAQ:INTC) Xeon in the datacenter. Now, the Radeon Instinct MI is in the spotlight. The powerful new Radeon graphics cards are designed to be used together with those Epyc CPUs to deliver a knock-out punch to Nvidia Corporation (NASDAQ:NVDA) in powering the next wave of artificial intelligence.

Source: AMD

Radeon Instinct MI

AMD has been launching new Radeon graphics cards based on its advanced Vega architecture throughout 2017. They’ve been landing in some high-profile positions already, including a starring role as the graphics firepower at the heart of Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) monster of a professional all-in-one PC, the iMac Pro.

The company has now released details about its Radeon Instinct MI graphics cards, the latest to be based on that new Vega architecture. There are three new cards in the lineup. The instinct MI6 sits in the middle of the range, offering an all-round, high performance computing solution. The compact MI8 is at the lower end, offering a relatively inexpensive entry to the Radeon Instinct MI family.

The flagship of the line is the Radeon Instinct MI25, with 4,096 stream processors, 64 compute units, 16GB of ultra-fast ECC HBM2 RAM and a peak 24.6 teraflops of FP16 or 12.3 TFLOPS of FP32 processing power.

That is an incredible amount of graphics processing power in a single card and AMD is billing it as the “world’s fastest training accelerator for machine learning and deep intelligence.”

Unlike previously announced Vega-based Radeon Graphics cards, the Radeon Instinct MI series is not aimed at consumers or desktop PCs at all. Instead, AMD is targeting an increasingly important market: AI.

AMD’s Formula: Instinct MI + Epyc + ROCm = AI Dominance

Technology companies are increasingly reliant on machine learning and artificial intelligence. Everything from Apple’s Siri personal assistant to Amazon.com, Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Echo smart speaker and Tesla Inc’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) Autopilot rely on AI technology.

AMD’s graphics card rival — and market leader — Nvidia is all over AI. Earlier this year, the company announced its latest solution, the HGX-1 hyperscale GPU accelerator.

But AMD has a key advantage over Nvidia: it also makes its own CPUs, so it can offer customers a complete solution, not just the graphics cards to plug into someone else’s system.

And those AMD Epyc processors were designed to beat Intel’s Xeon in terms of the ability to drive multiple graphics cards. In addition, AMD is publishing a series of open source software tools for working with the Radeon Instinct MI. The ROCm 1.6 software platform will be launched on June 29. As Tom’s Hardware’s Paul Alcorn points out, ROCm is an important offering because the companies building machine learning and AI data centers are concerned about vendor lock-in and proprietary solutions. Being open source is a big deal.

Tom’s Hardware also did the math to show what AMD’s complete solution looks like: an Epyc-powered chassis populated with as many as six Radeon Instinct MI GPUs. That’s up to 100 TFLOPS of power in one unit, all configured to work with leading machine intelligence platforms using the open source ROCm software. It’s what AMD hopes has all the pieces needed to become the leader in AI and HPC (high performance computing) hardware.

To put that processing power in some perspective, the new Xbox One X — the world’s most powerful gaming console (and also equipped with AMD graphics) — cranks out up to 6 TFLOPs.

Availability

AMD has officially announced all the components of its AI solution, and the complete package will roll out throughout 2017. The Epyc processors launched at the start of this week. The ROCm 1.6 software is available starting June 29. And the final pieces of the puzzle — the Radeon Instinct MI graphics cards — are due to arrive in Q3.

As of this writing, Brad Moon did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.

Brad Moon has been writing for InvestorPlace.com since 2012. He also writes about stocks for Kiplinger and has been a senior contributor focusing on consumer technology for Forbes since 2015.


Article printed from InvestorPlace Media, https://investorplace.com/2017/06/advanced-micro-devices-inc-amd-stock-radeon-instinct-mi/.

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