Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD), taking aim at a burgeoning market dominated by Nvidia Corp, on Wednesday unveiled new accelerator chips that it said would be able to run artificial intelligence (AI) software faster than rival products.
The company introduced a long-anticipated lineup called the MI300 at an event in San Jose, California. AMD chief executive officer Lisa Su (蘇姿丰) also gave an eye-popping forecast for the size of the AI chip industry, saying it could climb to more than US$400 billion in the next four years.
That is more than twice as high as a projection AMD gave in August.
Photo: Bloomberg
Building AI systems that rival human intelligence — considered the holy grail of computing — is now within reach, Su said in an interview.
However, deployment of the technology is still only just beginning.
It would take time to assess the impact on productivity and other aspects of the economy, she said.
“The truth is we’re so early,” Su said. “This is not a fad. I believe it.”
AMD is showing increasing confidence that the MI300 lineup can win over some of the biggest names in technology, potentially diverting billions in spending toward the company.
Customers using the processors will include Microsoft Corp, Oracle Corp and Meta Platforms Inc, AMD said.
The new AMD chip has more than 150 billion transistors and 2.4 times as much memory as Nvidia’s H100, the current market leader, AMD said.
It also has 1.6 as much memory bandwidth, further boosting performance, it said.
Su said that the new chip is equal to Nvidia’s H100 in its ability to train AI software and much better at inference — the process of running that software once it is ready for real-world use.
While the company expressed confidence in its product’s performance, Su said it would not just be a competition between two companies. Many others will vie for market share, too.
At the same time, Nvidia is developing its own next-generation chips. The H100 is to be succeeded by the H200 in the first half of next year, giving access to a new high-speed type of memory. That should match at least some of what AMD is offering. And then Nvidia is expected to come out with a whole new architecture for the processor later in the year.
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