For years AMD has been trying to grab a share of the datacenter GPU market from Nvidia. It hasn't had much success, largely due to poor software support for its Instinct GPUs. But it looks like the situation is improving and the company finally has its breakthrough product. At least, the chief executive of AMD believes that the upcoming Instinct MI300-series will be the company's fastest product to ramp to $1 billion sales.
"We now expect datacenter GPU revenue to be approximately $400 million in the fourth quarter and exceed $2 billion in 2024 as revenue ramps throughout the year," said Lisa Su, chief executive of AMD, at the company's earnings call with analysts and investors (via Motley Fool). "This growth would make MI300 the fastest product to ramp to $1 billion in sales in AMD history."
There is a reason why AMD's Instinct MI300-series is expected to be considerably more successful than its predecessor. The new product family will address not only supercomputers and select datacenters, but also cloud service providers (CSPs) which plan to use these processors for AI training and inference as they find their performance and software capabilities competitive.
In fact, AMD is already shipping Instinct MI300A accelerated processing units to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the El Capitan supercomputer, one of the first machines with performance of over 2 ExaFLOPS. The AMD Instinct MI300A is a multi-chiplet design featuring three eight-core Zen 4 chiplets and multiple CDNA3 chiplets for artificial intelligence (AI) and high performance computing (HPC) workloads.
In the coming weeks the company intends to start shipments of its Instinct MI300X processor to cloud service providers. Unlike MI300A, AMD's MI300X solely uses CDNA3-based chiplets for AI and HPC and acts like a typical compute GPU.
"Production shipments of Instinct MI300A APUs started earlier this month to support the El Capitan Exascale supercomputer, and we are on track to begin production shipments of Instinct MI300X GPU accelerators to lead cloud and OEM customers in the coming weeks," said Su.
On the hardware front, the development and validation of AMD's Instinct MI300A and MI300X accelerators are progressing as planned, with performance now either meeting or surpassing the company's internal expectations, according to the executive. As far as software is concerned, AMD has broadened its AI software ecosystem, achieving significant advancements in enhancing the performance and features of its ROCm platform this past quarter. Besides, ROCm has been integrated into the mainstream PyTorch and TensorFlow ecosystems. Furthermore, Hugging Face models are now consistently updated and validated to run on AMD hardware in general and Instinct accelerators in particular.
