AMD today announced the new Ryzen 8040 mobile processor series codenamed "Hawk Point." These chips are shipping to notebook manufacturers now, and the first notebooks powered by these should be available to consumers in Q1-2024. At the heart of this processor is a significantly faster neural processing unit (NPU), designed to accelerate AI applications that will become relevant next year, as Microsoft prepares to launch Windows 12, and software vendors make greater use of generative AI in consumer applications.

The Ryzen 8040 "Hawk Point" processor is almost identical in design and features to the Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix," except for a faster Ryzen AI NPU. While this is based on the same first-generation XDNA architecture, its NPU performance has been increased to 16 TOPS, compared to 10 TOPS of the NPU on the "Phoenix" silicon. AMD is taking a whole-of-silicon approach to AI acceleration, which includes not just the NPU, but also the "Zen 4" CPU cores that support the AVX-512 VNNI instruction set that's relevant to AI; and the iGPU based on the RDNA 3 graphics architecture, with each of its compute unit featuring two AI accelerators, components that make the SIMD cores crunch matrix math. The whole-of-silicon performance figures for "Phoenix" is 33 TOPS; while "Hawk Point" boasts of 39 TOPS. In benchmarks by AMD, "Hawk Point" is shown delivering a 40% improvement in vision models, and Llama 2, over the Ryzen 7040 "Phoenix" series.

AMD today announced the new AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators, the first exascale-class GPU accelerators. AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators includes the world's fastest high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator,1 the AMD Instinct MI250X.

Built on AMD CDNA 2 architecture, AMD Instinct MI200 series accelerators deliver leading application performance for a broad set of HPC workloads. The AMD Instinct MI250X accelerator provides up to 4.9X better performance than competitive accelerators for double precision (FP64) HPC applications and surpasses 380 teraflops of peak theoretical half-precision (FP16) for AI workloads to enable disruptive approaches in further accelerating data-driven research.

GIGABYTE Technology, an industry leader in high-performance servers and workstations, today is announcing a partnership with Northern Data AG to create a HPC mega-project with computing power of around 3.1 exaflops. GIGABYTE will supply GPU-based server systems equipped with proven AMD EPYC processors and AMD Radeon Instinct accelerators from technology partner AMD, a leading provider of high performance computing and graphics technologies, to Northern Data.

Northern Data develops a distributed computing cluster based on the hardware at locations in Norway, Sweden and Canada, which in its final stage of deployment will provide FP32 computing power of around 3.1 exaflops (3.1 million teraflops and 274.54 petaflops FP64). The world's fastest supercomputer, the Japanese "Fukagu" (Fujitsu), has a calculation power of 1.07 exaflops FP32 and 415.3 petaflops FP64, whereas the second fastest, the US supercomputer "Summit" (IBM) has a calculation power of 0.414 exaflops FP32 and 148.0 petaflops FP64.

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced revenue for the second quarter of 2020 of $1.93 billion, operating income of $173 million, net income of $157 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.13. On a non-GAAP basis, operating income was $233 million, net income was $216 million and diluted earnings per share was $0.18. "We delivered strong second quarter results, led by record notebook and server processor sales as Ryzen and EPYC revenue more than doubled from a year ago," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. "Despite some macroeconomic uncertainty, we are raising our full-year revenue outlook as we enter our next phase of growth driven by the acceleration of our business in multiple markets."

AMD today announced multiple new high-performance computing wins for AMD EPYC processors, including that the seventh fastest supercomputer in the world and four of the 50 highest-performance systems on the bi-annual TOP500 list are now powered by AMD. Momentum for AMD EPYC processors in advanced science and health research continues to grow with new installations at Indiana University, Purdue University and CERN as well as high-performance computing (HPC) cloud instances from Amazon Web Services, Google, and Oracle Cloud.

"The leading HPC institutions are increasingly leveraging the power of 2nd Gen AMD EPYC processors to enable cutting-edge research that addresses the world's greatest challenges," said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, data center and embedded systems group, AMD. "Our AMD EPYC CPUs, Radeon Instinct accelerators and open software programming environment are helping to advance the industry towards exascale-class computing, and we are proud to strengthen the global HPC ecosystem through our support of the top supercomputing clusters and cloud computing environments."

Mark Papermaster, chief technology officer and executive vice president of Technology and Engineering at AMD, today confirmed that CDNA is on-track for release in 2H2020 for HPC computing. The confirmation was (adequately) given during Dell's EMC High-Performance Computing Online event. This confirms that AMD is looking at a busy 2nd half of the year, with both Zen 3, RDNA 2 and CDNA product lines being pushed to market.

CDNA is AMD's next push into the highly-lucrative HPC market, and will see the company differentiating their GPU architectures through market-based product differentiation. CDNA will see raster graphics hardware, display and multimedia engines, and other associated components being removed from the chip design in a bid to recoup die area for both increased processing units as well as fixed-function tensor compute hardware. CNDA-based Radeon Instinct MI100 will be fabricated under TSMC's 7 nm node, and will be the first AMD architecture featuring shared memory pools between CPUs and GPUs via the 2nd gen Infinity Fabric, which should bring about both throughput and power consumption improvements to the platform.

AMD and technology partner Penguin Computing Inc., a division of SMART Global Holdings, Inc, today announced that New York University (NYU), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Rice University are the first universities named to receive complete AMD-powered, high-performance computing systems from the AMD HPC Fund for COVID-19 research. AMD also announced it will contribute a cloud-based system powered by AMD EPYC and AMD Radeon Instinct processors located on-site at Penguin Computing, providing remote supercomputing capabilities for selected researchers around the world. Combined, the donated systems will collectively provide researchers with more than seven petaflops of compute power that can be applied to fight COVID-19.

"High performance computing technology plays a critical role in modern viral research, deepening our understanding of how specific viruses work and ultimately accelerating the development of potential therapeutics and vaccines," said Lisa Su, president and CEO, AMD. "AMD and our technology partners are proud to provide researchers around the world with these new systems that will increase the computing capability available to fight COVID-19 and support future medical research."

AMD is preparing to launch its next-generation of Radeon Instinct GPUs based on the new CDNA architecture designed for enterprise deployments. Thanks to the popular hardware leaker _rogame (@_rogame) we have some information about the configuration of the upcoming Radeon Instinct MI100 "Arcturus" server GPU. Previously, we obtained the BIOS of the Arcturus GPU that showed a configuration of 128 Compute Units (CUs), which resulted in 8,192 of CDNA cores. That configuration had a specific setup of 1334 MHz GPU clock, SoC frequency of 1091 MHz, and memory speed of 1000 MHz. However, there was another GPU test board spotted which featured a bit different specification.

The reported configuration is an Arcturus GPU with 120 CUs, resulting in a CDNA core count of 7,680 cores. These cores are running at frequencies of 878 MHz for the core clock, 750 MHz SoC clock, and a surprising 1200 MHz memory clock. While the SoC and core clocks are lower than the previous report, along with the CU count, the memory clock is up by 200 MHz. It is important to note that this is just a test board/variation of the MI100, and actual frequencies should be different.

AMD on April 15 updated its COVID-19 response strategy to include a sizable donation of enterprise hardware from its inventory towards COVID-19 vaccine research. The company is giving away $15 million worth HPCs cloud computing nodes powered by EPYC enterprise processors and Radeon Instinct scalar compute accelerators to key research institutions at the forefront of vaccine research for COVID-19. AMD says that these systems will be of a turnkey nature, so they could be quickly deployed and put to use. The company invites any institution conducting COVID-19 related research to contact them for access to the node.

Making the announcement, CEO Dr. Lisa Su writes: "AMD is announcing today a COVID-19 HPC fund to provide research institutions with computing resources to accelerate medical research on COVID-19 and other diseases. The fund will include an initial donation of $15 million of high-performance systems powered by AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Radeon Instinct GPUs to key research institutions. To ease the implementation and speed the useful impact from these donations, we are working with our HPC system provider partners to provide ready-to-install HPC nodes. Research institutions should contact AMD at COVID-19HPC[at]amd[dot]com to submit proposals for access to these nodes."

TechPowerUp today released the latest version of GPU-Z, the popular graphics subsystem information and diagnostic utility. Version 2.30.0 introduces several new feature- and stability updates, and adds support for new GPUs. To begin with, support is added for AMD Radeon RX 590 GME, Radeon Pro W5500, Pro V7350x2, FirePro 2260, and Instinct MI25 MxGPU; Intel UHD (Core i5-10210Y), and a rare GeForce GTS 450 Rev 2. TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.30.0 introduces support for reporting hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling in Windows 10 20H1 in the Advanced tab. The tab now also has the ability to show WDDM 2.7, Shader Model 6.6, DirectX Mesh Shaders, and DXR tier 1.1. A workaround for the DirectML detection on Windows 10 19041 built has been added. Graphics driver registry path is now displayed in the General section of the Advanced tab.

In the Sensors tab, the NVIDIA VDDC sensor has been renamed to "GPU voltage," and AMD's "GPU only power draw" sensor to "GPU chip-only power draw" to clarify that the sensor only measures the power draw of the GPU package and not the whole graphics card. AMD "Renoir" based processors and their iGPUs now show up as 7 nm. Windows Basic Display driver now no longer reports its status as WHQL or Beta. A crash during DirectX 12 detection has been fixed.DOWNLOAD: TechPowerUp GPU-Z 2.30.0

The change-log follows.

AMD at its 2020 Financial Analyst Day event unveiled its upcoming CDNA GPU-based compute accelerator architecture. CDNA will complement the company's graphics-oriented RDNA architecture. While RDNA powers the company's Radeon Pro and Radeon RX client- and enterprise graphics products, CDNA will power compute accelerators such as Radeon Instinct, etc. AMD is having to fork its graphics IP to RDNA and CDNA due to what it described as market-based product differentiation.

Data centers and HPCs using Radeon Instinct accelerators have no use for the GPU's actual graphics rendering capabilities. And so, at a silicon level, AMD is removing the raster graphics hardware, the display and multimedia engines, and other associated components that otherwise take up significant amounts of die area. In their place, AMD is adding fixed-function tensor compute hardware, similar to the tensor cores on certain NVIDIA GPUs.

AMD's upcoming large post-Navi graphics chip, codenamed "Arcturus," will debut as "Radeon Instinct MI100", which is an AI-ML accelerator under the Radeon Instinct brand, which AMD calls "Server Accelerators." TechPowerUp accessed its BIOS, which is now up on our VGA BIOS database. The card goes with the device ID "0x1002 0x738C," which confirms "AMD" and "Arcturus,". The BIOS also confirms that memory size is at a massive 32 GB HBM2, clocked at 1000 MHz real (possibly 1 TB/s bandwidth, if memory bus width is 4096-bit).

Both Samsung (KHA884901X) and Hynix memory (H5VR64ESA8H) is supported, which is an important capability for AMD's supply chain. From the ID string "MI100 D34303 A1 XL 200W 32GB 1000m" we can derive that the TDP limit is set to a surprisingly low 200 W, especially considering this is a 128 CU / 8,192 shader count design. Vega 64 and Radeon Instinct MI60 for comparison have around 300 W power budget with 4,096 shaders, 5700 XT has 225 W with 2560 shaders, so either AMD achieved some monumental efficiency improvements with Arcturus or the whole design is intentionally running constrained, so that AMD doesn't reveal their hand to these partners, doing early testing of the card.

AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced revenue for the second quarter of 2019 of $1.53 billion, operating income of $59 million, net income of $35 million and diluted earnings per share of $0.03. On a non-GAAP basis, operating income was $111 million, net income was $92 million and diluted earnings per share was $0.08.

"I am pleased with our financial performance and execution in the quarter as we ramped production of three leadership 7nm product families," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD president and CEO. "We have reached a significant inflection point for the company as our new Ryzen, Radeon and EPYC processors form the most competitive product portfolio in our history and are well positioned to drive significant growth in the second half of the year."

TAITRA, the governing body behind the annual Computex trade-show held in Taipei each June, announced that AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su will host a keynote address which promises to be as exciting as her CES keynote. It is revealed that Dr. Su will simultaneously launch or unveil at least four product lines. High up the agenda is AMD's highly anticipated 3rd generation Ryzen desktop processors in the socket AM4 package, based on "Zen 2" microarchitecture, and a multi-chip module (MCM) codenamed "Matisse." This launch could be followed up by a major announcement related to the company's 2nd generation EPYC enterprise processors based on the "Rome" MCM.

PC enthusiasts are in for a second major announcement, this time from RTG, with a technical reveal or unveiling of Radeon "Navi," the company's first GPU designed from the ground up for the 7 nm silicon fabrication process. It remains to be seen which market-segment AMD targets with the first "Navi" products, and the question on everyone's minds, whether AMD added DXR acceleration, could be answered. Lastly, the company could announce more variants of its Radeon Instinct DNN accelerators.

Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) announced today that the 2019 COMPUTEX International Press Conference will be held with a Keynote by AMD President and CEO Dr. Lisa Su. The 2019 COMPUTEX International Press Conference & CEO Keynote is scheduled for Monday, May 27 at 10:00 AM in Room 201 of the Taipei International Convention Center (TICC) in Taipei, Taiwan with the keynote topic "The Next Generation of High-Performance Computing".

"COMPUTEX, as one of the global leading technology tradeshows, has continued to advance with the times for more than 30 years. This year, for the first time, a keynote speech will be held at the pre-show international press conference," said Mr. Walter Yeh, President & CEO, TAITRA, "Dr. Lisa Su received a special invitation to share insights about the next generation of high-performance computing. We look forward to her participation attracting more companies to participate in COMPUTEX, bringing the latest industry insights, and jointly sharing the infinite possibilities of the technology ecosystem on this global stage."

AMD late November filed a trademark application with the USPTO for a new logo, for its second generation "Vega" graphics architecture, built around the 7 nm silicon fabrication process. The logo looks similar to the original Vega "V," with two bands marking out the Roman numeral II (2). This logo could appear on the product and marketing on a series of new Radeon Pro and Radeon Instinct (and possibly even gaming-grade Radeon RX?) graphics cards based on AMD's new "Vega 20" multi-chip module. This chip features a doubling in memory bandwidth thanks to its 4096-bit wide HBM2 interface, and the optical shrink of the GPU die to the 7 nm node could enable AMD to dial up engine clocks significantly.

AMD recently announced the Radeon Instinct MI60, a GPU-based data-center compute processor with hardware virtualization features. It takes the crown for "the world's first 7 nm GPU." The company also put out specifications of the "Vega 20" GPU it's based on: 4,096 stream processors, 4096-bit HBM2 memory interface, 1800 MHz engine clock-speed, 1 TB/s memory bandwidth, 7.4 TFLOP/s peak double-precision (FP64) performance, and the works. Here's the kicker: the company isn't launching this accelerator with Windows support. At launch, AMD is only releasing x86-64 Linux drivers, with API support for OpenGL 4.6, Vulkan 1.0, and OpenCL 2.0, along with AMD's ROCm open ecosystem. The lack of display connector already disqualifies this card for most workstation applications, but with the lack of Windows support, it is also the most expensive graphics card that "can't run Crysis." AMD could release Radeon Pro branded graphics cards based on "Vega 20," which will ship with Windows and MacOS drivers.

AMD today held its "New Horizon" event for investors, offering guidance and "color" on what the company's near-future could look like. At the event, the company formally launched its Radeon Instinct MI60 GPU-based compute accelerator; and disclosed a few interesting tidbits on its next-generation "Zen 2" mircroarchitecture. The Instinct MI60 is the world's first GPU built on the 7 nanometer silicon fabrication process, and among the first commercially available products built on 7 nm. "Rome" is on track to becoming the first 7 nm processor, and is based on the Zen 2 architecture.

The Radeon Instinct MI60 is based on a 7 nm rendition of the "Vega" architecture. It is not an optical shrink of "Vega 10," and could have more number-crunching machinery, and an HBM2 memory interface that's twice as wide that can hold double the memory. It also features on-die logic that gives it hardware virtualization, which could be a boon for cloud-computing providers.

AMD "Vega 20" is a new GPU based on existing "Vega" graphics architecture, which will be fabbed on the 7 nanometer silicon fabrication process, and bolstered with up to 32 GB of HBM2 memory across a 4096-bit memory interface that's double the bus-width of "Vega 10". AMD CEO Lisa Su already exhibited a mock-up of this chip at Computex 2018, with an word that alongside its "Zen 2" based EPYC enterprise processors, "Vega 20" will be the first 7 nm GPU. AMD could still make good on that word, only don't expect to find one under your tree this Holiday.

According to GamersNexus, the first "Vega 20" products won't launch before the turn of the year, and even in 2019, one can expect product launches till the end of Q1 (before April). GamersNexus cites reliable sources hinting at the later-than-expected arrival of "Vega 20" as part of refuting alleged "Final Fantasy XV" benchmarks of purported "Vega 20" engineering samples doing rounds on the web. Lisa Su stressed the importance of data-center GPUs in AMD's Q3-2018 earnings call, which could hint at the possibility of AMD allocating its first "Vega 20" yields to high-margin enterprise brands such as Radeon Pro and Radeon Instinct.

It would appear AMD's 7nm Vega 20 has been benchmarked in Final Fantasy XV. While the details are scarce, what we do know is the hardware device ID 66AF:C1 can be linked to Vega 20 via the Linux patches back in April. Now considering AMD has not confirmed any 7nm Vega graphics cards for consumers, It is more likely this version is an engineering sample for the new Radeon Instinct or Pro series cards.

xGMI (inter-chip global memory interconnect) is a cable-capable version of AMD's Infinity Fabric interconnect. A line of code in the latest version of AMDGPU Linux drivers reveals that "Vega 20" will support xGMI. This line tells the driver to check the state of xGMI link. A practical implementation of this could be inter-card high-bandwidth bridge connectivity that would otherwise saturate the PCI-Express host bus; similar to NVIDIA's usage of the new NVLink bridge for Quadro and Tesla products based on its "Volta" and "Turing" GPU architectures.

By no means should xGMI and NVLink implementations be interpreted as a coming back of multi-GPU to the gaming space. There are still no takers for DirectX 12 multi-GPU, and fewer AAA games support SLI or CrossFire. Even at higher resolutions/refresh-rates, existing SLI/CrossFire physical-layer standards have sufficient bandwidth for multi-GPU. The upcoming GeForce RTX 2000 graphics cards feature a new multi-GPU connector that's physically NVLink, but this is probably an attempt by NVIDIA to discard the legacy SLI bus and minimize redundant interfaces on its silicon. The TU102 and TU104 chips are implemented in the enterprise segment with the Quadro RTX family. The main application of xGMI/NVLink is to make multi-GPU hardware setups abstract to deep-learning software, so hardware can scale in the background with memory access spanning multiple GPUs. "Vega 20" will be launched in Radeon Pro and Radeon Instinct avatars late-2018.

Samsung has reportedly doubled its manufacturing output of HBM2 (high-bandwidth memory 2) stacks. Despite this, the company may still fall short of the demand for HBM2, according to HPC expert Glenn K Lockwood, Tweeting from the ISC 2018, the annual HPC industry event held between 24th to 28th June in Frankfurt, where Samsung was talking about its 2nd generation "Aquabolt" HBM2 memory, which is up to 8 times faster than GDDR5, with up to 307 GB/s bandwidth from a single stack.

While HBM2 is uncommon on consumer graphics cards (barring AMD's flagship Radeon RX Vega series, and NVIDIA's TITAN V), the memory type is in high demand with HPC accelerators that are mostly GPU-based, such as AMD Radeon Instinct series, and NVIDIA Tesla. The HPC industry itself is riding the gold-rush of AI research based on deep-learning and neural-nets. FPGAs, chips that you can purpose-build for your applications, are the other class of devices soaking up HBM2 inventories. The result of high demand, coupled with high DRAM prices could mean HBM2 could still be too expensive for mainstream client applications.

Back at Computex, AMD showed a demo of their Vega 20 graphics processor, which is produced using a refined 7 nanometer process. We also reported that the chip has a twice-as-wide memory interface, effectively doubling memory bandwidth, and alsomaximum memory capacity. The smaller process promises improvements to power efficiency, which could let AMD run the chip at higher frequencies for more performance compared to the 14 nanometer process of existing Vega.

As indicated by AMD during Computex, the 7 nanometer Vega is a product targeted at High Performance Compute (HPC) applications, with no plans to release it for gaming. As they clarified later, the promise of "7 nanometer for gamers" is for Navi, which follows the Vega architecture. It's even more surprising to see AOTS results for a non-gaming card - my guess is that someone was curious how well it would do in gaming.

Raja Koduri, chief of AMD's Radeon Technologies Group (RTG), has reportedly taken an extended leave from the company, running up to December 2017. Ryan Shrout, editor of PC Perspective stated that he got confirmation from the company about this development. Company CEO Lisa Su has taken direct control over RTG in the meantime.

Formed in 2015 after a major internal reorganization, RTG handles a bulk of AMD's graphics IP, developing and marketing products under the Radeon brand, including Radeon RX series consumer graphics chips, Radeon Pro series professional graphics chips, and Radeon Instinct line of GPGPU accelerators. This move is of particular significance as Q4 tends to be the biggest revenue quarter, as sales rally on account of Holiday.

AMD is reportedly scaling down efforts on its end to support and promote multi-GPU technologies such as CrossFire, and not in favor of open-standards such as DirectX 12 native multi-GPU, either. Speaking to GamersNexus, an AMD representative confirmed that while the new Radeon RX Vega family of graphics cards support CrossFire, the company may not allocate as many resources as it used to with older GPU launches, in promoting or supporting it.

This is keeping up with trends in the industry moving away from multi-GPU configurations, and aligns with NVIDIA's decision to dial-down investment in SLI. This also more or less confirms that AMD won't build a Radeon RX series consumer graphics product based on two "Vega 10" ASICs. At best, one can expect dual-GPU cards for the professional or GPU-compute markets, such as the Radeon Pro or Radeon Instinct brands.