AMD celebrates AI advances with partner event

AMD has nailed its colors to the mast with regard to artificial intelligence (AI) by hosting an industry event focusing on the arrival and evolution of the technology.

The event, which was hosted in San Jose in December, saw AMD chair and CEO Lisa Su joined by representatives from Arista, Broadcom, Cisco, Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Lenovo, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and Supermicro.

During the event, several new AI-focused products were launched, including ROCm 6 open software stack, which AMD said has “significant optimizations and new features supporting large language models (LLMs)”.

It was the new members of the Instinct MI300 Series accelerators that really stole the show, however.

MI300X accelerators are being deployed by Microsoft in Azure instances optimized for AI workloads, while Oracle announced plans to offer Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) bare metal compute products featuring the chips.

Meta is adding MI300X accelerators to its data centers along with ROCm 6 to power AI inference workloads. Meanwhile, specialized AI cloud providers Aligned, Arkon Energy, Cirrascale, Crusoe, Denvr Dataworks, and Tensorwaves all announced plans that would expand access to MI300X GPUs for developers and AI startups.

OpenAI, the progenitor of GPT-4, ChatGPT, and Dall-E, explained how it’s adding support for AMD Instinct accelerators to Triton 3 – its GPU programming language for neural networks, while AI startups Databricks, Essential AI and Lamini discussed how they’re using MI300X accelerators and ROCm 6 in products for their enterprise customers. 

Finally, two of the largest data center infrastructure providers, HPE and Dell Technologies, announced plans to incorporate the new accelerators across their portfolios.

“AI is the future of computing and AMD is uniquely positioned to power the end-to-end infrastructure that will define this AI era, from massive cloud installations to enterprise clusters and AI-enabled intelligent embedded devices and PCs," said Su. 

"We are seeing very strong demand for our new Instinct MI300 GPUs, which are the highest-performance accelerators in the world for generative AI. We are also building significant momentum for our data center AI solutions with the largest cloud companies, the industry's top server providers, and the most innovative AI startups who we are working closely with to rapidly bring Instinct MI300 solutions to market that will dramatically accelerate the pace of innovation across the entire AI ecosystem."