The Radeon Instinct product line directly competes with Nvidia's Ampere and Intel Xeon Phi and incoming Intel Xe lines of machine learning and GPGPU cards.
Before MI100 introduction in November 2020, the Instinct family was known as AMD Radeon Instinct, AMD dropped the Radeon brand from its name.
Supercomputers based on (AMD CPUs and) AMD Instinct GPUs now take the lead on the Green500 supercomputer list with over 50% lead over any other, and top the first 4 spots, including the second, which is the current fastest in the world on the TOP500 list, Frontier.
Products
This section needs to be updated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. (January 2022)
The three initial Radeon Instinct products were announced on December 12, 2016, and released on June 20, 2017, with each based on a different architecture.[3][4]
MI6
The MI6 is a passively cooled, Polaris 10 based card with 16 GB of GDDR5 memory and with a <150 WTDP.[1][2] At 5.7 TFLOPS (FP16 and FP32), the MI6 is expected to be used primarily for inference, rather than neural network training. The MI6 has a peak double precision (FP64) compute performance of 358 GFLOPS.[5]
MI8
The MI8 is a Fiji based card, analogous to the R9 Nano, and expected to have a <175W TDP.[1] The MI8 has 4 GB of High Bandwidth Memory. At 8.2 TFLOPS (FP16 and FP32), the MI8 is marked toward inference. The MI8 has a peak (FP64) double precision compute performance 512 GFLOPS.[6]
MI25
The MI25 is a Vega based card, utilizing HBM2 memory. The MI25 performance is expected to be 12.3 TFLOPS using FP32 numbers. In contrast to the MI6 and MI8, the MI25 is able to increase performance when using lower precision numbers, and accordingly is expected to reach 24.6 TFLOPS when using FP16 numbers. The MI25 is rated at <300W TDP with passive cooling. The MI25 also provides 768 GFLOPS peak double precision (FP64) at 1/16th rate.[7]
MI300 Series
The MI300A and MI300X are data center accelerators that use the CDNA 3 architecture, which is optimized for high-performance computing (HPC) and generative artificial intelligence (AI) workloads. The CDNA 3 architecture features a scalable multi-chip module (MCM) design that leverages TSMC’s advanced packaging technologies, such as CoWoS (chip-on-wafer-on-substrate) and InFO (integrated fan-out), to combine multiple chiplets on a single interposer. The chiplets are interconnected by AMD’s Infinity Fabric, which enables high-speed and low-latency data transfer between the chiplets and the host system.
The MI300A is an accelerated processing unit (APU) that integrates 24 Zen 4 CPU cores with four CDNA 3 GPU cores, resulting in a total of 228 CUs in the GPU section and 128 GB of HBM3 memory. The Zen 4 CPU cores are based on the 5 nm process node and support the x86-64 instruction set, as well as AVX-512 and BFloat16 extensions. The Zen 4 CPU cores can run general-purpose applications and provide host-side computation for the GPU cores. The MI300A has a peak performance of 61.3 TFLOPS of FP64 (122.6 TFLOPS FP64 matrix) and 980.6 TFLOPS of FP16 (1961.2 TFLOPS with sparsity), as well as 5.3 TB/s of memory bandwidth. The MI300A supports PCIe 5.0 and CXL 2.0 interfaces, which allow it to communicate with other devices and accelerators in a heterogeneous system.
The MI300X is a dedicated generative AI accelerator that replaces the CPU cores with additional GPU cores and HBM memory, resulting in a total of 304 CUs and 192 GB of HBM3 memory. The MI300X is designed to accelerate generative AI applications, such as natural language processing, computer vision, and deep learning. The MI300X has a peak performance of 653.7 TFLOPS of TP32 (1307.4 TFLOPS with sparsity) and 1307.4 TFLOPS of FP16 (2614.9 TFLOPS with sparsity), as well as 5.3 TB/s of memory bandwidth. The MI300X also supports PCIe 5.0 and CXL 2.0 interfaces, as well as AMD’s ROCm software stack, which provides a unified programming model and tools for developing and deploying generative AI applications on AMD hardware.[8][9][10]
Following software is, as of 2022, regrouped under the Radeon Open Compute meta-project.
MxGPU
The MI6, MI8, and MI25 products all support AMD's MxGPU virtualization technology, enabling sharing of GPU resources across multiple users.[1][11]
MIOpen
MIOpen is AMD's deep learning library to enable GPU acceleration of deep learning.[1] Much of this extends the GPUOpen's Boltzmann Initiative software.[11] This is intended to compete with the deep learning portions of Nvidia's CUDA library. It supports the deep learning frameworks: Theano, Caffe, TensorFlow, MXNet, Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, Torch, and Chainer. Programming is supported in OpenCL and Python, in addition to supporting the compilation of CUDA through AMD's Heterogeneous-compute Interface for Portability and Heterogeneous Compute Compiler.
^GCD Refers to a Graphics Compute Die. Each GCD is a different piece of silicon.
^CDNA 2.0 Based cards adopt a design using two dies on the same package.They are linked with 400GB/s Bidirectional Infinity Fabric link, The dies are addressed as individual GPUs by the host system.
