AMD Launches Instinct MI300X AI GPU Accelerator, Up To 60% Faster Than NVIDIA H100

AMD has announced the official launch of its flagship AI GPU accelerator, the MI300X, which offers up to 60% better performance than NVIDIA's H100.

The AMD Instinct MI300 class of AI accelerators will be another chiplet powerhouse, making use of advanced packaging technologies from TSMC. Today, AMD not only announced the launch of these chips but shared the first performance benchmarks of the MI300X which look great. AMD first used the general specs as a comparison and their CDNA 3 accelerator offers (versus NVIDIA H100):

In general LLM Kernel TFLOPs, the MI300X offers up to 20% higher performance in FlashAttention-2 and Llama 2 70B. Looking from a platform perspective which compares an 8x MI300X solution to an 8X H100 solution, we see a much bigger 40% gain in Llama 2 70B & a 60% gain in Bloom 176B.

AMD mentions that in training performance, the MI300X is on par with the competition (H100) and offers competitive price/perf while shining in inferencing workloads.

The driving force behind the latest MI300 accelerators is ROCm 6.0. The software stack has been updated to the latest version with powerful new features which include support for various AI workloads such as Generative AI and Large language models.

The new software stack supports the latest compute formats such as FP16, Bf16, and FP8 (including Sparsity). The optimizations combine to offer up to 2.6x speedup in vLLM through optimized inference libraries, 1.4x speedup in HIP Graph through optimized runtime, and 1.3x Flash Attention speedup through optimized Kernels. ROCm 6 is expected later this month alongside the MI300 AI accelerators. It will be interesting to see how ROCm 6 compares to the latest version of NVIDIA's CUDA stack which is its real competition.

The AMD Instinct MI300X is the chip that will be highlighted the most since it is targeted at NVIDIA's Hopper and Intel's Gaudi accelerators within the AI segment. This chip has been designed solely on the CDNA 3 architecture and there is a lot of stuff going on. The chip is going to host a mix of 5nm and 6nm IPs, all combining to deliver up to 153 Billion transistors (MI300X).

Starting with the design, the main interposer is laid out with a passive die which houses the interconnect layer using a 4th Gen Infinity Fabric solution. The interposer includes a total of 28 dies which include eight HBM3 packages, 16 dummy dies between the HBM packages, & four active dies and each of these active dies gets two compute dies.

Each GCD based on the CDNA 3 GPU architecture features a total of 40 compute units which equals 2560 cores. There are eight compute dies (GCDs) in total so that gives us a total of 320 Compute & 20,480 core units. For yields, AMD will be scaling back a small portion of these cores and we will be seeing a total of 304 Compute units (38 CUs per GPU chiplet) enabled for a total of 19,456 stream processors.

Memory is another area where you will see a huge upgrade with the MI300X boasting 50% more HBM3 capacity than its predecessor, the MI250X (128 GB). To achieve a memory pool of 192 GB, AMD is equipping the MI300X with 8 HBM3 stacks and each stack is 12-Hi while incorporating 16 Gb ICs which give us 2 GB capacity per IC or 24 GB per stack.

The memory will offer up to 5.3 TB/s of bandwidth and 896 GB/s of Infinity Fabric Bandwidth. For comparison, NVIDIA's upcoming H200 AI accelerator offers 141 GB capacities while Gaudi 3 from Intel will be offering 144 GB capacities. Large memory pools matter a lot in LLMs which are mostly memory-bound and AMD can show its AI prowess by leading in the memory department. For comparisons:

In terms of power consumption, the AMD Instinct MI300X is rated at 750W which is a 50% increase over the 500W of the Instinct MI250X and 50W more than the NVIDIA H200.

One configuration showcased is the G593-ZX1/ZX2 series of servers from Gigabyte which offer up to 8 MI300X GPU accelerators and two AMD EPYC 9004 CPUs. These systems will be equipped with up to eight 3000W power supplies, totaling 18000W of power. AMD also showcased its own Instinct MI300X platform which includes 8 of these AI accelerator chips, offering some solid numbers over the NVIDIA HGX H100 platform. Some numbers shared by AMD include:

For now, AMD should know that their competitors are also going full steam ahead on the AI craze with NVIDIA already teasing some huge figures for its 2024 Hopper H200 GPUs & Blackwell B100 GPUs and Intel prepping up its Guadi 3 and Falcon Shores GPUs for launch in the coming years too. Companies such as Oracle, Dell, META, and OpenAI have announced support for AMD's Instinct MI300 AI chips in their ecosystem.

One thing is for sure at the current moment, AI customers will gobble up almost anything they can get and everyone is going to take advantage of that. But AMD has a very formidable solution that is not just aiming to be an alternative to NVIDIA but a leader in the AI segment.