AMD Instinct MI200 will be equipped with 256 CUs and 128GB HBM2e

by ·

At the 49th Global Technology, Media, and Communications Conference held by JP Morgan Chase last month, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su confirmed that the GPU with the DNA 2 architecture codenamed Aldebaran will be launched within this year. This computing card, probably called the Instinct MI200, is specifically designed for computing-intensive and HPC workloads.

The US Department of Energy’s Frontier E-class supercomputer that will be delivered this year will use this computing card, and the Instinct MI200 computing card is rumored to have 128GB of HBM2e video memory. Previously, through the Linux update patch driven by AMD 64 EDAC, it has been confirmed that the Instinct MI200 computing card will adopt MCM (Multi-Chip-Module) packaging technology, two computing chips are used in a single chip package and interconnected through the next generation of Infinity Fabric bus technology.

Recently, Twitter user @Locuza_ introduced relevant details. Each computing chip of the Instinct MI200 computing card supports full-rate FP64/FP32 and the second-generation matrix engine, with 128 CUs or 8192 stream processors, so a computing card has 256 CUs or 16384 stream processors. However, the Instinct MI200 computing card will shield some CUs. In fact, only 224 CUs or 14336 stream processors are used, which is about 14% less than the full core.

At the same time, each computing chip will support VCN 2.6 and SDMA (System Direct Memory Access), equipped with an independent PCIe interface and XGMI, and configured with a 4096-bit HBM2e video memory interface, corresponding to 64GB of video memory. Assuming that AMD uses SK Hynix’s latest HBM2e particles with a rate of 3.6Gbps, it will provide 3.64 TB/s of bandwidth for the GPU. Since the video memory with ECC is used, part of the bandwidth and capacity will be used for error correction, and the actual capacity is not as much as 128 GB.

Tags: