CEO confirms that Instinct MI400 series is in development

AMD has recently released the new generation of Instinct MI300 series compute accelerator cards, both CPU+GPU in the form of Instinct MI300A (Zen 4+CDNA 3), and the GPU-only Instinct MI300X (CDNA 3), complemented by high-capacity HBM3, to satisfy the needs of large language models (LLMs) requiring substantial memory capacity and bandwidth.

Distinct from previous offerings, one of the primary virtues of the Instinct MI300 series is its multifunctionality, achieved through the use of modular stacking technology. Both APU and GPU share an architecture, encapsulating modules of different cores together. High-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads benefit from a unified memory architecture. Although the Instinct MI300 series has not yet been fully rolled out, during the recent Q2 2023 earnings call, AMD’s CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, confirmed that the next-generation Instinct MI400 series is under development, though specific details were not provided at this time.

“When you look across those workloads and the investments that we’re making, not just today, but going forward with our next generation MI400 series and so on and so forth, we definitely believe that we have a very competitive and capable hardware roadmap. I think the discussion about AMD, frankly, has always been about the software roadmap, and we do see a bit of a change here on the software side. Number one, we’ve put a tremendous amount of resource on it. So, bringing together our former Xilinx software team, together with the AMD sort of based software team, we’ve dramatically increased the resources. And also the focus has now been on sort of optimizing at these higher level models.”

The Instinct MI400 series represents AMD’s fifth generation of Instinct products, targeted at high-end data centers and possibly based on the CDNA 4 architecture, introducing the novel XSwitch interconnect technology. It’s believed that AMD will adhere to the path set by previous Instinct products in hardware design. More intriguingly, Dr. Lisa Su mentioned AMD’s changes on the software front. Compared to their competitor NVIDIA, AMD has a significant gap in the software stack, causing the Instinct products to be at a disadvantage in competition, which has considerably impacted sales.