AMD today unveiled its strategy to accelerate the machine intelligence era in server computing through a new suite of hardware and open-source software offerings designed to dramatically increase performance, efficiency, and ease of implementation of deep learning workloads.
New Radeon Instinct accelerators will offer organisations powerful GPU-based solutions for deep learning inference and training. Along with the new hardware offerings, AMD announced MIOpen, a free, open-source library for GPU accelerators intended to enable high-performance machine intelligence implementations, and new, optimised deep learning frameworks on AMD’s ROCm software to build the foundation of the next evolution of machine intelligence workloads.
Inexpensive high-capacity storage, an abundance of sensor driven data, and the exponential growth of user-generated content are driving exabytes of data globally. Recent advances in machine intelligence algorithms mapped to high-performance GPUs are enabling orders of magnitude acceleration of the processing and understanding of that data, producing insights in near real time. Radeon Instinct is a blueprint for an open software ecosystem for machine intelligence, helping to speed inference insights and algorithm training.
Radeon Instinct accelerators feature passive cooling, AMD MultiGPU (MxGPU) hardware virtualization technology conforming with the SR-IOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) industry standard, and 64-bit PCIe addressing with Large Base Address Register (BAR) support for multi-GPU peer-to-peer support.
Radeon Instinct accelerators are designed to address a wide-range of machine intelligence applications:
- The Radeon Instinct MI6 accelerator based on the acclaimed Polaris GPU architecture will be a passively cooled inference accelerator optimised for jobs/second/Joule with 5.7 TFLOPS of peak FP16 performance at 150W board power and 16GB of GPU memory
- The Radeon Instinct MI8 accelerator, harnessing the high-performance, energy-efficient “Fiji” Nano GPU, will be a small form factor HPC and inference accelerator with 8.2 TFLOPS of peak FP16 performance at less than 175W board power and 4GB of High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM)
- The Radeon Instinct MI25 accelerator will use AMD’s next-generation high-performance Vega GPU architecture and is designed for deep learning training, optimized for time-to-solution
AMD is also investing in developing interconnect technologies that go beyond today’s PCIe Gen3 standards to further performance for tomorrow’s machine intelligence applications. AMD is collaborating on a number of open high-performance I/O standards that support broad ecosystem server CPU architectures including X86, OpenPOWER, and ARM AArch64. AMD is a founding member of CCIX, Gen-Z and OpenCAPI working towards a future 25 Gbit/s phi-enabled accelerator and rack-level interconnects for Radeon Instinct.
Radeon Instinct products are expected to ship in 1H 2017. For more information, visit Radeon.com/Instinct.
