AMD releases Instinct MI200 series computing cards
AMD announces the launch of Instinct MI200 series computing cards based on the CDNA 2 architecture. This is the first GPU in a MCM multi-chip package and the first exascale GPU accelerator. AMD Instinct MI250X is the world’s fastest high-performance computer (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator card.
AMD Instinct MI250X is equipped with a GPU code-named Aldebaran, with 58 billion transistors, manufactured using TSMC’s 6nm process, with 128GB of HBM2e memory (total bandwidth 3.2 TB/s), a total of 220 CUs (14080 stream processors), TDP is 560W. The small chips in PU are supplemented by XGMI internal interconnection design, all with VCN 2.6 controller. Through 2.5D Elevated Fanout Bridge (EFB) packaging technology, the number of GPU cores has reached 1.8 times that of the previous generation, and the memory bandwidth has also reached 2.7 times.
The two small chips in the GPU are connected by AMD Infinity Fabric technology, providing up to 100 GB/s bidirectional bandwidth. This belongs to the third-generation Infinity Fabric technology, which can manage up to 8 Infinity Fabric links, and connect the Instinct MI200 series computing card to the third-generation EPYC processor to achieve CPU and GPU memory consistency and maximize system throughput. AMD said that the new GPU architecture can accelerate FP64 and FP32 matrix operations, and the theoretical peak performance of FP64 can reach up to 4 times that of the previous generation.
Instinct MI200 series of computing cards have three configurations, namely Instinct MI250 (208 CU) and Instinct MI250X (220 CU) of OAM specification, and Instinct MI210 of dual-slot PCIe specification. There is three first batch of supercomputers using Instinct MI200 series computing cards, namely Frontier of the United States, pre-exascale LUMI of the European Union, and Setonix of Australia. In the enterprise market in the first quarter of 2022, OEM and ODM partners will adopt Instinct MI200 series computing cards, including Asus, Lenovo, Dell, Hewlett-Packard (HPE), and Supermicro, etc.
