AMD Instinct is

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, that develops computer processors and related technologies for business and consumer markets. While it initially manufactur ...

's brand of professional

GPUs A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobil ...

. 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 Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains. An ANN is based on a collection of connected unit ...

, and

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) uses supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into a mult ...

GPGPU General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, or less often GPGP) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditiona ...

applications. The Radeon Instinct product line directly competes with

Nvidia Nvidia CorporationOfficially written as NVIDIA and stylized in its logo as VIDIA with the lowercase "n" the same height as the uppercase "VIDIA"; formerly stylized as VIDIA with a large italicized lowercase "n" on products from the mid 1990s to ...

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 Xeon Phi was a series of x86 manycore processors designed and made by Intel. It was intended for use in supercomputers, servers, and high-end workstations. Its architecture allowed use of standard programming languages and application program ...

and incoming

Intel Xe Intel Xe (stylized as Xe and pronounced as two separate letters, abbreviation for "eXascale for everyone"), earlier known unofficially as Gen12, is a GPU architecture developed by Intel. Intel Xe includes a new instruction set architecture. Th ...

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 A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions p ...

based on (AMD CPUs and) AMD Instinct GPUs now take the lead on the

Green500 The Green500 is a biannual ranking of supercomputers, from the TOP500 list of supercomputers, in terms of energy efficiency. The list measures performance per watt using the TOP500 measure of high performance LINPACK benchmarks at double-precisi ...

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 The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computing, distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these ...

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 Graphics Double Data Rate 5 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory (GDDR5 SDRAM) is a type of synchronous graphics random-access memory (SGRAM) with a high bandwidth (" double data rate") interface designed for use in graphics cards, game cons ...

memory and with a <150 W TDP. At 5.7

TFLOPS In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate mea ...

(

FP16 In computing, half precision (sometimes called FP16) is a binary floating-point computer number format that occupies 16 bits (two bytes in modern computers) in computer memory. It is intended for storage of floating-point values in applications w ...

and FP32), 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 High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is a high-speed computer memory interface for 3D-stacked synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) initially from Samsung, AMD and SK Hynix. It is used in conjunction with high-performance graphics accelerators ...

. 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 Vega is the brightest star in the northern constellation of Lyra. It has the Bayer designation α Lyrae, which is Latinised to Alpha Lyrae and abbreviated Alpha Lyr or α Lyr. This star is relatively close at only from the Sun, an ...

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 In computing, virtualization or virtualisation (sometimes abbreviated v12n, a numeronym) is the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) version of something at the same abstraction level, including virtual computer hardware platforms, stor ...

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 CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach ca ...

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 TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks but has a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks. "It is machine learnin ...

, MXNet,

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 A torch is a stick with combustible material at one end, which is ignited and used as a light source. Torches have been used throughout history, and are still used in processions, symbolic and religious events, and in juggling entertainment. In ...

, and

Chainer Chainer is an open source deep learning framework written purely in Python on top of NumPy and CuPy Python libraries. The development is led by Japanese venture company Preferred Networks in partnership with IBM, Intel, Microsoft, and Nvidia. ...

. Programming is supported in

OpenCL OpenCL (Open Computing Language) is a framework for writing programs that execute across heterogeneous platforms consisting of central processing units (CPUs), graphics processing units (GPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), field-progra ...

and

Python Python may refer to: Snakes * Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia ** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia * Python (mythology), a mythical serpent Computing * Python (pro ...

, 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