Tuesday, November 3rd 2020
AMD Eyes Mid-November CDNA Debut with Instinct MI100, "World's Fastest FP64 Accelerator"
AMD is eyeing a mid-November debut for its CDNA compute architecture with the Instinct MI100 compute accelerator card. CDNA is a fork of RDNA for headless GPU compute accelerators with large SIMD resources. An Aroged report pins the launch of the MI100 at November 16, 2020, according to leaked AMD documents it dug up. The Instinct MI100 will eye a slice of the same machine intelligence pie NVIDIA is seeking to dominate with its A100 Tensor Core compute accelerator.
It appears like the first MI100 cards will be built in the add-in-board form-factor with PCI-Express 4.0 x16 interfaces, although older reports do predict AMD creating a socketed variant of its Infinity Fabric interconnect for machines with larger numbers of these compute processors. In the leaked document, AMD claims that the Instinct MI100 is the "world's highest double-precision accelerator for machine learning, HPC, cloud compute, and rendering systems." This is an especially big claim given that the A100 Tensor Core features FP64 CUDA cores based on the "Ampere" architecture. Then again, given that AMD claims that the RDNA2 graphics architecture is clawing back at NVIDIA with performance at the high-end, the competitiveness of the Instinct MI100 against the A100 Tensor Core cannot be discounted.
Sources:
Aroged, VideoCardz
It appears like the first MI100 cards will be built in the add-in-board form-factor with PCI-Express 4.0 x16 interfaces, although older reports do predict AMD creating a socketed variant of its Infinity Fabric interconnect for machines with larger numbers of these compute processors. In the leaked document, AMD claims that the Instinct MI100 is the "world's highest double-precision accelerator for machine learning, HPC, cloud compute, and rendering systems." This is an especially big claim given that the A100 Tensor Core features FP64 CUDA cores based on the "Ampere" architecture. Then again, given that AMD claims that the RDNA2 graphics architecture is clawing back at NVIDIA with performance at the high-end, the competitiveness of the Instinct MI100 against the A100 Tensor Core cannot be discounted.
12 Comments on AMD Eyes Mid-November CDNA Debut with Instinct MI100, "World's Fastest FP64 Accelerator"
These supercomputers must have had a simulation system, or some other solid assurance, of CDNA's performance. Otherwise, they all wouldn't have chosen AMD here. As such, I'm willing to bet that this MI100 has to be pretty good.
personally i think some of the HPC client probably are not too comfortable with nvidia dominance in accelerator market. hence they are giving more AMD chance this time. plus AMD have their own CPU so they can offer better integration between CPU and GPU. it is one of the reason why nvidia going after mellanox which is very popular among HPC client for it's interconnect tech.
Na, its an open standard agreed to by a consortium same as OpenCapi, nvidia just happens to be part of it... no ownership over it.
There's nothing "unsuitable" about OpenACC, aside from the fact that OpenMP's version of it (4.5+) is more up to date. Not much reason to support OpenACC technically anymore, since OpenMP 4.5 or 5.0 support will get you the same stuff.