Lenovo’s VP Confirms Instinct MI400 HPC APU Accelerator As Part of AMD’s Instinct Roadmap

AMD's upcoming Instinct MI300 APU is truly an engineering marvel, combining x86 CPU & GPU cores for the server segment but the company already has the next-gen MI400 planned on its roadmap as confirmed by Lenovo's Vice President.

At CES 2023, AMD reiterated the specifications of its Instinct MI300 APU which will be the world's first data center chip with an integrated x86 CPU and GPU architecture. Featuring a behemoth 146 Billion transistors, the chip is truly the bleeding edge of what modern chipmakers can achieve and utilizes the advantaged 3D Chiplet packaging technology, combining TSMC's 5nm and 6nm IPs in a singular unit.

But what comes next? It's no surprise that AMD will continue this APU approach for the Instinct family down the roadmap and that's exactly what Lenovo's Vice President, Scott Tease, has to say. The VP confirmed that AMD has Instinct MI400 and more down the roadmap & they like what they have seen so far. Surely, who wouldn't? I mean you are getting both high-performance CPU & GPU cores on the same package with fast memory, fast interconnects and vast amounts of IO. Following is what Scott had to say:

However, this transition introduces challenges for OEMs on a couple of fronts. Thermal management being chief among them. Today CPUs are consuming north of 400W while GPUs are pushing 600W. “I would expect some of these APUs to come in at over a kilowatt,” Tease said.

At that point, liquid cooling isn’t just a nice to have but rather a requirement.

Another challenge is software support. While Intel and Nvidia have a long history of software development in support of their chips, the same can’t be said of AMD.

“We like the looks of the MI300 and the MI400 and the roadmap, but the software ecosystem is still a problem,” said Tease. “It’s still not turnkey and easy for run-rate customers.”

via The Next Platform

But as grand as the chip aims to be, there are definitely some downsides of a chip this big with a radically different design. Scott states that future AMD Instinct GPUs such as the MI300 & MI400 can consume over a Kilowatt of power which will be an increase of over 2x versus current-gen CPU and GPU designs for servers. This huge increase in power would necessitate the use of higher-end liquid cooling solutions to cool off these monster chips.

It's not just the hardware side but also the software side that needs to be mature by the time these chips launch. It's one of the highlighted problems by the Lenovo VP since the new architecture and the software around it may be able to run 70% of the applications out there the missing 30% are going to make users go back to the traditional x86 designs. Same is the case with NVIDIA's Hopper and Grace implementation, more so the Grace CPU Superchip, which uses the Arm architecture. In the coming years, we are going to say more hybrid designs in the server segment such as Instinct APUs from AMD, Superchips from NVIDIA, and Falcon Shores-esque designs from Intel.