AMD Instinct MI200 CDNA 2 ‘Aldebaran’ MCM HPC GPU Accelerator Launching Later This Year, Will Compete Against Intel Ponte Vecchio & NVIDIA Ampere

AMD's CEO has confirmed that the successor to the CDNA architecture-powered Instinct GPU HPC accelerator is on its way for launch later this year.

The confirmation came during JPMorgan's 49th Annual Global Technology Communications and Media conference. AMD's CEO, Lisa Su, stated that they will be launching the next generation of CDNA architecture later this year. Following is the transcript from the conference (Source: Seeking Alpha).

Last year, we talked about our first-generation CDNA architecture. This year, as I said, we’re putting together our next-generation CDNA architecture. This is actually a key component that enabled us to win the largest supercomputer bids in the US around the Frontier Oak Ridge National Labs installment as well as the Lawrence Livermore National Labs installment with El Capitan and many others.

But it’s a coherent interconnect between CPUs and GPUs that allow us to fully optimize for HPC and for AI and ML applications. And we will be launching the next generation of that architecture, actually, later this year. We’re very excited about it. I think it’s progressed extremely well. It’s the next big step in sort of innovation around the data center architectures.

Dr. Lisa Su (AMD CEO)

The AMD CDNA 2 architecture will be powering the next-generation AMD Instinct HPC accelerators. We know that one of those accelerators will be the MI200 which will feature the Aldebaran GPU. It's going to be a very powerful chip and possibly the first GPU to feature an MCM design. The Instinct MI200 is going to compete against Intel's 7nm Ponte Vecchio and NVIDIA's refreshed Ampere parts. Intel and NVIDIA are also following the MCM route on their next-generation HPC accelerators but it looks like Ponte Vecchio is going to be available in 2022 and the same can be said for NVIDIA's next-gen HPC accelerator as their own roadmap confirmed.

In the previous Linux patch, it was revealed that l that the AMD Instinct MI200 'Aldebaran' GPU will feature HBM2E memory support. NVIDIA was the first to hop on board the HBM2E standard and will offer a nice boost over the standard HBM2 configuration used on the Arcturus-based MI100 GPU accelerator. HBM2E allows up to 16 GB memory capacity per stack so we can expect up to 64 GB HBM2E memory at blisteringly fast speeds for Aldebaran.

The latest Linux Kernel Patch revealed that the GPU carries 16 KB of L1 cache per CU which makes up 2 MB of the total L1 cache considering that the GPU will be packing 128 Compute Units. The GPU also carries 8 MB of shared L2 cache but carries 14 CUs per Shader Engine compared to 16 CUs per SE in the previous Instinct lineup. Regardless, it is stated that each CU on Aldebaran GPUs will have a significantly higher computing output.

Other features listed include SDMA (System Direct Memory Access) support which will allow data transfers over PCIe and XGMI/Infinity Cache subsystems. As far as Infinity Cache is concerned, it's looking like that won't be happening on HPC GPUs. Do note that AMD's CDNA 2 GPU will be fabricated on a brand new process node & are confirmed to feature a 3rd Generation AMD Infinity architecture that extends to Exascale by allowing up to 8-Way coherent GPU connectivity.