AMD's Instinct MI455X: Aiming for the Sun

(chipsandcheese.com)

33 points | by ingve 5 hours ago ago

7 comments

  • fancyfredbot 26 minutes ago

    It's mind blowing seeing these multi exaflop single rack systems.

    The world's first exaflop supercomputer was Frontier. It was launched only 4 years ago in 2022.

    It's not a fair comparison of course. FP4 in Helios barely qualifies as floating point. Frontier was proper fp64, 16 times the bit width and probably 256x as many transistors.

    All the same just wow. Much compute.

  • thyristan an hour ago

    > The basic GCN microarchitecture underpinned every single one of AMD’s compute accelerators for nearly 15 years [...]. With CDNA5 AMD has moved over to a microarchitecture that is based on the RDNA series putting a bookend to the long-lived line that was the GCN microarchitecture.

    So everything is new again. Will this be another "buy now, have ROCM work in 3 maybe years if you are lucky"?

    • p_l an hour ago

      Arguably this might reduce it, because now ROCm won't be prioritised for the GCN-based systems?

  • dist-epoch an hour ago

    432 GB of RAM per chip. Tens of terabytes per rack. Clients queuing up to buy them.

    RAM prices are not coming down any time soon.

    • swiftcoder 6 minutes ago

      Hey, they are only projected to cost about $5.5million a rack. Pocket change, really

    • nl an hour ago

      Did anyone think RAM prices were coming down soon?

      • ACCount37 43 minutes ago

        Of course. Wishful thinking is a true staple of human intelligence.