AMD Unveils Instinct MI200 ‘Aldebaran’ GPU, First 6nm MCM Product With 58 Billion Transistors, Over 14,000 Cores & 128 GB HBM2e Memory

AMD has officially announced its next-generation MI200 HPC GPU codenamed Aldebaran that uses a 6nm CDNA 2 architecture to deliver insane compute performance.

AMD is officially the first to MCM technology and they are doing so with a grand product which is their Instinct MI200 codenamed Aldebaran. The AMD Aldebaran GPU will come in various forms & sizes but it's all based on the brand new CDNA 2 architecture which is the most refined variation of Vega. Some of the main features before we go into detail are listed below:

AMD Instinct MI200 GPU Die Shot:

Inside the AMD Instinct MI200 is an Aldebaran GPU featuring two dies, a secondary and a primary. It has two dies with each consisting of 8 shader engines for a total of 16 SE's. Each Shader Engine packs 16 CUs with full-rate FP64, packed FP32 & a 2nd Generation Matrix Engine for FP16 & BF16 operations.

Each die, as such, is composed of 128 compute units or 8192 stream processors. This rounds up to a total of 220 compute units or 14,080 stream processors for the entire chip. The Aldebaran GPU is also powered by a new XGMI interconnect. Each chiplet features a VCN 2.6 engine and the main IO controller.

Built on AMD CDNA 2 architecture, AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators deliver leading application performance for a broad set of HPC workloads. The AMD Instinct MI250X accelerator provides up to 4.9X better performance than competitive accelerators for double precision (FP64) HPC applications and surpasses 380 teraflops of peak theoretical half-precision (FP16) for AI workloads to enable disruptive approaches in further accelerating data-driven research.

In terms of performance, AMD is touting various record wins in the HPC segment over NVIDIA's A100 solution with up to 3x performance improvements in AMG.

As for DRAM, AMD has gone with an 8-channel interface consisting of 1024-bit interfaces for an 8192-bit wide bus interface. Each interface can support 2GB HBM2e DRAM modules. This should give us up to 16 GB of HBM2e memory capacity per stack and since there are eight stacks in total, the total amount of capacity would be a whopping 128 GB. That's 48 GB more than the A100 which houses 80 GB HBM2e memory. The memory will clock in at an insane speed of 3.2 Gbps for a full-on bandwidth of 3.2 TB/s. This is a whole 1.2 TB/s more bandwidth than the A100 80 GB which has 2 TB/s.

The AMD Instinct MI200 will be powering three top-tier supercomputers which include the United States’ exascale Frontier system; the European Union’s pre-exascale LUMI system; and Australia’s petascale Setonix system. The competition includes the A100 80 GB which offers 19.5 TFLOPs of FP64, 156 TFLOPs of FP32 and 312 TFLOPs of FP16 compute power. But we are likely to hear about NVIDIA's own Hopper MCM GPU next year so there's going to be a heated competition between the two GPU juggernauts in 2022.

The Aldebaran MI200 GPU will come in three configurations, the OAM only MI250 and MI250X & the dual-slot PCIe MI210. AMD has only shared full specifications and performance figures for its MI250 class HPC GPUs. The MI250X features the full 14,080 configurations and delivers 47.9, 95.7, 383 TFLOPs of FP64/FP32/FP16 while the MI250 features 13,312 cores with 45.3,90.5,362.1 TFLOPs of FP64/FP32/FP16 performance. The memory configuration remains the same between the two GPU configurations.

AMD Instinct MI200 GPU Package: