AMD Instinct is AMD's brand of professional GPUs. It replaced AMD's FirePro S brand in 2016. Compared to the

Radeon Radeon () is a brand of computer products, including graphics processing units, random-access memory, RAM disk software, and solid-state drives, produced by Radeon Technologies Group, a division of AMD. The brand was launched in 2000 by ATI Tech ...

brand of mainstream consumer/gamer products, the Instinct product line is intended to accelerate deep learning, artificial neural network, and high-performance computing/ GPGPU applications. The Radeon Instinct product line directly competes with Nvidia's

Ampere The ampere (, ; symbol: A), often shortened to amp,SI supports only the use of symbols and deprecates the use of abbreviations for units. is the unit of electric current in the International System of Units (SI). One ampere is equal to elect ...

and Intel Xeon Phi and incoming Intel Xe lines of machine learning and GPGPU cards. Before MI100 introduction in November 2020, the Instinct family was known as AMD Radeon Instinct, AMD dropped the Radeon brand from its name. Supercomputers based on (AMD CPUs and) AMD Instinct GPUs now take the lead on the Green500 supercomputer list with over 50% lead over any other, and top the first 4 spots, including the second, which is the current fastest in the world on the TOP500 list,

Frontier A frontier is the political and geographical area near or beyond a boundary. A frontier can also be referred to as a "front". The term came from French in the 15th century, with the meaning "borderland"—the region of a country that fronts o ...

Products

The three initial Radeon Instinct products were announced on December 12, 2016, and released on June 20, 2017, with each based on a different architecture.

MI6

The MI6 is a passively cooled,

Polaris 10 The Radeon 400 series is a series of graphics processors developed by AMD. These cards were the first to feature the Polaris GPUs, using the new 14 nm FinFET manufacturing process, developed by Samsung Electronics and licensed to GlobalFoundrie ...

based card with 16 GB of GDDR5 memory and with a <150 W TDP. At 5.7 TFLOPS ( FP16 and

FP32 Single-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP32 or float32) is a computer number format, usually occupying 32 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide dynamic range of numeric values by using a floating radix point. A floating- ...

), the MI6 is expected to be used primarily for inference, rather than neural network training. The MI6 has a peak double precision (FP64) compute performance of 358 GFLOPS.

MI8

The MI8 is a

Fiji Fiji ( , ,; fj, Viti, ; Fiji Hindi: फ़िजी, ''Fijī''), officially the Republic of Fiji, is an island country in Melanesia, part of Oceania in the South Pacific Ocean. It lies about north-northeast of New Zealand. Fiji consists ...

based card, analogous to the R9 Nano, and expected to have a <175W TDP. The MI8 has 4 GB of High Bandwidth Memory. At 8.2 TFLOPS (FP16 and FP32), the MI8 is marked toward inference. The MI8 has a peak (FP64) double precision compute performance 512 GFLOPS.

MI25

The MI25 is a Vega based card, utilizing HBM2 memory. The MI25 performance is expected to be 12.3 TFLOPS using FP32 numbers. In contrast to the MI6 and MI8, the MI25 is able to increase performance when using lower precision numbers, and accordingly is expected to reach 24.6 TFLOPS when using FP16 numbers. The MI25 is rated at <300W TDP with passive cooling. The MI25 also provides 768 GFLOPS peak double precision (FP64) at 1/16th rate.

Software

ROCm

Following software is, as of 2022, regrouped under the Radeon Open Compute meta-project.

MxGPU

The MI6, MI8, and MI25 products all support AMD's MxGPU virtualization technology, enabling sharing of GPU resources across multiple users.

MIOpen

MIOpen is AMD's deep learning library to enable GPU acceleration of deep learning. Much of this extends the GPUOpen's Boltzmann Initiative software. This is intended to compete with the deep learning portions of Nvidia's CUDA library. It supports the deep learning frameworks:

Theano In Greek mythology, Theano (; Ancient Greek: Θεανώ) may refer to the following personages: *Theano, wife of Metapontus, king of Icaria. Metapontus demanded that she bear him children, or leave the kingdom. She presented the children of Melan ...

, Caffe, TensorFlow,

MXNet Apache MXNet is an open-source deep learning software framework, used to train and deploy deep neural networks. It is scalable, allowing for fast model training and supports a flexible programming model and multiple programming languages (inclu ...

Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, previously known as CNTK and sometimes styled as The Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit, is a deprecated deep learning framework developed by Microsoft Research. Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit describes neural networks as a seri ...

, Torch, and Chainer. Programming is supported in OpenCL and Python, in addition to supporting the compilation of CUDA through AMD's Heterogeneous-compute Interface for Portability and Heterogeneous Compute Compiler.

Chipset table

References

External links

AMD Instinct accelerators web page
{{Graphics Processing Unit Coprocessors AMD graphics cards GPGPU Parallel computing