FILE PHOTO: The logo of semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) is seen on a graphics processing unit (GPU) chip in this illustration picture taken February 17, 2023. REUTERS/Florence Lo/Illustration/File photo
TAIPEI: Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD) is speeding up introductions of new artificial intelligence (AI) processors as it seeks to dent Nvidia Corp’s domination of that lucrative market.
The MI325X will go on sale in the fourth quarter, chief executive officer Lisa Su said in the opening keynote address of the Computex conference in Taiwan.
That chip, the successor to the MI300, will feature more memory and faster data throughput, the company said. MI350 will follow in 2025 and the MI400 model a year after that.
The move to a roughly annual release cycle matches Nvidia’s plans, set out by chief executive Jensen Huang in a speech the night before in Taipei.
AMD is among the companies rushing to market with new products aimed at tapping the flood of cash being poured into new AI training systems, money that’s currently mainly being spent on Nvidia’s offerings.
Su said the company is still getting strong demand for its existing MI300 products and its new models will compare favourably with rival offerings.
Santa Clara-based AMD has shown the most progress among the group chasing Nvidia. AMD has increased its sales target for so-called AI accelerators to US$4bil this year. That rapid increase from next to nothing last year still pales in comparison with Nvidia.
Nvidia’s data centre unit alone is on course to have annual sales that will exceed US$100bil, according to estimates, topping AMD and Intel Corp’s combined total annual revenue.
For consumers, AMD talked about its third-generation Ryzen AI processors, dubbed Strix Point and going on sale from July.
Those are tailored for laptops and combine RDNA 3.5 mobile graphics, XDNA 2 neural processing units for accelerating AI tasks, and the latest Zen 5 processing cores.
Su invited a succession of partners out on stage – from HP Inc chief executive Enrique Lores and Lenovo Group Ltd executive vice-president Luca Rossi to Asustek Computer Inc chairman Jonney Shih – to discuss upcoming machines featuring AMD’s new Ryzen platform.
AMD showed a slide suggesting the latest Ryzen system performs better with AI tasks than Qualcomm Inc’s Snapdragon X Elite, the chip that will feature heavily at Computex at the heart of Microsoft Corp’s new Copilot+ PCs.
Microsoft’s Windows chief Pavan Davuluri also joined Su on stage to say his team “have collaborated with AMD since day one” on the Copilot PC+ project.
“On-device AI really for us means faster response times, better privacy and cost,” Davuluri said. “But that means running models that have billions of parameters in them on PC hardware.
Compared to traditional PCs even from just a few years ago, we’re talking 20 times the performance and up to 100 times the efficiency for AI workloads.” — Bloomberg
