AMD showcases TSMC-made MI300X to compete with Nvidia

AMD, one of the two GPU giants in the world, announced its latest offerings for the AI age, trying to compete with its arch-rival Nvidia by lowering customers' total cost of ownership and an open platform.

During a presentation on June 13, AMD CEO Lisa Su disclosed the specifications for the MI300X, which has one fewer chiplet but more HBM3 memories than MI300A. MI300X, with 153 billion transistors across 12 5/6nm chiplets, is based on AMD's CDNA 3 technology and uses 192GB HBM3 memories, delivering 5.2TB per second of memory bandwidth. DIGITIMES reported that TSMC is the manufacturer of the 5/6nm chiplets of MI300X.

Su said that compared with the competition, MI300X offers 2.4 times more memory and 1.6 times more memory bandwidth and can be run directly in memory, supporting large language models of up to 80 billion parameters on a single GPU. Su further said that MI300X reduces the number of GPU customers needed, significantly speeds up the performance, especially for interference, and reduces the total cost of ownership, thereby making the technology more accessible to the broader ecosystem.

AMD will complement MI300X with its AMD Instinct Platform, which uses 8 MI300X in the industry standard OCP infrastructure, helping customers to use MI300X in an industry-standard platform that drops right into their existing infrastructure with minimal changes.

While AMD is looking to provide an industry-standard platform for its customers, Nvidia offers proprietary hardware and software systems, MarketWatch reports.

Both MI300X and the AMD Instinct Platform will begin sampling in the third quarter before entering mass production in the fourth quarter, said Su.

Still, Reuters and Benzinga Newswire reported that Su did not name who will adopt the MI300X. Reuters quoted Keven Krewell, principal analyst at TIRIAS Research, saying that the lack of a large customer explicitly saying they will use MI300A or MI300X may have disappointed the investors.

Besides, Reuters quoted Anshel Sag, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, saying that people still are not convinced regarding the competitiveness of AMD's software solution compared to Nvidia's.

Source: Bloomberg, June 2023