AMD's Instinct family has welcomed a new addition—the MI388X AI accelerator—as discovered in a lengthy regulatory 10K filing (submitted to the SEC). The document reveals that the unannounced SKU—along with the MI250, MI300X and MI300A integrated circuits—cannot be sold to Chinese customers due to updated US trade regulations (new requirements were issued around October 2023). Versal VC2802 and VE2802 FPGA products are also mentioned in the same section. Earlier this month, AMD's Chinese market-specific Instinct MI309 package was deemed to be too powerful for purpose by the US Department of Commerce.

AMD has not published anything about the Instinct MI388X's official specification, and technical details have not emerged via leaks. The "X" tag likely implies that it has been designed for AI and HPC applications, akin to the recently launched MI300X accelerator. The designation of a higher model number could (naturally) point to a potentially more potent spec sheet, although Tom's Hardware posits that MI388X is a semi-custom spinoff of an existing model.

AMD's entry-level Radeon RX 7600 GPU launched last May—critical reception was lukewarm, and Team Red enthusiasts found more compelling "budget" options within the preceding RDNA 2 generation. AMD's board partners rolled out customized Radeon RX 7600 8 GB cards—as planned—but the reference design was a scarcity around launch time. As pointed out by TPU's resident graphics card reviewer extraordinaire, W1zzard, a "Made by AMD" (MBA) model was lined up for direct sale via official AMD online stores, "as well as through its board partners, with minimal re-branding." Plans were (apparently) scuppered by a discovery of 8-pin power cable insertion issues—review outlets informed AMD about these problems prior to launch.

According to a fresh VideoCardz report, AMD has started to offer its Radeon RX 7600 reference design through official European channels: "despite the initial promise of offering the RX 7600 directly to gamers through their webstore, AMD has struggled to generate significant interest in the card nearly a year after its launch. Furthermore, there hasn't been a substantial change in pricing, with the card still retailing at $269 (in the US). Turns out, the Radeon RX 7600 MBA is now available in Germany." Several European shop portals display prices of €295 (~$318) and €300 (~$324)—at the time of writing. Potential customers will have to weigh up the benefit of AMD's extra time spent on ironing out the reference design's past issues, versus market-tested + custom-cooled partner models.

Shipping manifests appear to be great sources of pre-release information—only a few hours ago, the existence of prototype AMD "Strix Point" and "Fire Range" mobile processors was highlighted by hardware sleuth harukaze5719. A related leak has appeared online fairly quickly after the discovery of laptop-oriented "Zen 5" chips. momomo_us joined in on the fun, with their exposure of speculated desktop silicon. Two brand-new AMD OPN codes have been linked to the upcoming "Granite Ridge" series of AM5 processors.

100-000001404-01 is likely an eight-core/ sixteen-thread "Zen 5" Ryzen CPU with a 170 W TDP—a stepping designation, B0, indicates engineering sample status. The other listing, 100-000001290-21, seems to be an A0-type engineering sample—leaked info suggests that this a six-core/twelve-thread (105 W TDP) next-gen mainstream desktop processor. AMD is likely nearing the finish line with its Ryzen 9000-series—a new generation of chipsets, including X870E, is reportedly in the pipeline. Additionally, VideoCardz posits that a refresh of 700-series boards could be on the cards. "Granite Range" CPUs are expected to retain the current-gen 6 nm client I/O die (cIOD), as sported by "Raphael" Ryzen 7000-series desktop processors.

Ryan McCurdy, President of Lenovo North America, revealed ambitious forward-thinking product roadmap during an interview with CRN magazine. A hybrid strategic approach will create an anticipated AI fast lane on future hardware—McCurdy, a former Intel veteran, stated: "there will be a steady stream of product development to add (AI PC) hardware capabilities in a chicken-and-egg scenario for the OS and for the (independent software vendor) community to develop their latest AI capabilities on top of that hardware...So we are really paving the AI autobahn from a hardware perspective so that we can get the AI software cars to go faster on them." Lenovo—as expected—is jumping on the AI-on-device train, but it will be diversifying its range of AI server systems with new AMD and Intel-powered options. The company has reacted to recent Team Green AI GPU supply issues—alternative units are now in the picture: "with NVIDIA, I think there's obviously lead times associated with it, and there's some end customer identification, to make sure that the products are going to certain identified end customers. As we showcased at Tech World with NVIDIA on stage, AMD on stage, Intel on stage and Microsoft on stage, those industry partnerships are critical to not only how we operate on a tactical supply chain question but also on a strategic what's our value proposition."

McCurdy did not go into detail about upcoming Intel-based server equipment, but seemed excited about AMD's Instinct MI300X accelerator—Lenovo was (previously) announced as one of the early OEM takers of Team Red's latest CDNA 3.0 tech. CRN asked about the firm's outlook for upcoming MI300X-based inventory—McCurdy responded with: "I won't comment on an unreleased product, but the partnership I think illustrates the larger point, which is the industry is looking for a broad array of options. Obviously, when you have any sort of lead times, especially six-month, nine-month and 12-month lead times, there is interest in this incredible technology to be more broadly available. I think you could say in a very generic sense, demand is as high as we've ever seen for the product. And then it comes down to getting the infrastructure launched, getting testing done, and getting workloads validated, and all that work is underway. So I think there is a very hungry end customer-partner user base when it comes to alternatives and a more broad, diverse set of solutions."

AMD's Beijing AI PC Innovation Summit served as introduction point for a Chinese market launch of "Hawk Point" Ryzen 8040 mobile series and 8000G desktop processors—news coverage has, so far, focused on that rollout as well as a teasing of next-gen "Strix Point" processors. HXL/9550pro has put a spotlight on an easy-to-miss presentation slide—their social media post revealed the existence of new budget-friendly Ryzen 8000F CPUs. Team Red seems to be preparing two China-exclusive SKUs: Ryzen 7 8700F and Ryzen 5 8400F—not many details were revealed on-stage, so reporters have played a guessing game with speculated technical information. Industry experts believe that the 8700F is an iGPU-less version of AMD's "Hawk Point" Ryzen 7 8700G APU—utilizing the same 8 core and 16 thread configuration, but missing the Radeon 780M integrated graphics solution.

The lower-end SKU is a more perplexing product, since AMD did not elaborate much during "budget" product unveilings—VideoCardz put its thinking hat on for this one: "meanwhile, the 8400F might be harder to guess, as the name sits between 8500G and 8300G, both featuring vastly different configurations. An educated guess would be 6 cores and 12 threads, possibly with two Zen 4 and four Zen 4c cores." The "F" model suffix gained attention last year—courtesy of Team Red's Ryzen 5 7500F CPU. This iGPU-less "Raphael" Zen 4 SKU was initially released as a Chinese market exclusive, but eventually headed West as an option for system integrators.

Close monitoring of AMD engineering activities—around mid-February time—revealed the existence of a new set of patches for GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). At the time, news reports put spotlights on Team Red's "znver5" enablement—this target indicated that staffers were prepping Zen 5 processor microarchitecture with an expanded AVX instruction set (building on top of Zen 4's current capabilities). Phoronix's Michael Larabel has fretted over AMD's relative silence over the past month—regarding a possible merging of support prior to the stable release of GCC 14.

He was relieved to discover renewed activity earlier today: "AMD Zen 5 processor enablement has been merged to GCC Git in time for the GCC 14.1 stable release that will be out in the coming weeks. It was great seeing AMD getting their Zen 5 processor enablement upstreamed ahead of any Ryzen or EPYC product launches and being able to do so in time for the annual major GNU Compiler Collection feature release." Team Red is inching ever closer to the much anticipated 2024 rollout of next-gen Ryzen 9000 processors, please refer to a VideoCardz-authored timeline diagram (below)—"Granite Ridge" is an incoming AM5 desktop CPU family (reportedly utilizing Zen 5 and RDNA 2 tech), while "Strix Point" is scheduled to become a mobile APU series (Zen 5 + RDNA 3.5).

Microsoft's DirectX department is scheduled to show off several innovations at this month's Game Developers Conference (GDC), although a late February preview has already spilled their DirectSR Super Resolution API's beans. Today, retail support for Shader Model 6.8 and Work Graphs has been introduced with an updated version of the company's Agility Software Development Kit. Program manager, Joshua Tucker, stated that these technologies will be showcased on-stage at GDC 2024—Shader Model 6.8 arrives with a "host of new features for shader developers, including Start Vertex/Instance Location, Wave Size Range, and Expanded Comparison Sampling." A linked supplementary article—D3D12 Work Graphs—provides an in-depth look into the cutting-edge API's underpinnings, best consumed if you have an hour or two to spare.

Tucker summarized the Work Graphs API: "(it) utilizes the full potential of your GPU. It's not just an upgrade to the existing models, but a whole new paradigm that enables more efficient, flexible, and creative game development. With Work Graphs, you can generate and schedule GPU work on the fly, without relying on the host. This means you can achieve higher performance, lower latency, and greater scalability for your games with tasks such as culling, binning, chaining of compute work, and much more." AMD and NVIDIA are offering driver support on day one. Team Red has discussed the launch of "Microsoft DirectX 12 Work Graphs 1.0 API" in a GPUOpen blog—they confirm that "a deep dive" into the API will happen during their Advanced Graphics Summit presentation. NVIDIA's Wessam Bahnassi has also discussed the significance of Work Graphs—check out his "Advancing GPU-driven rendering" article. Graham Wihlidal—of Epic Games—is excited about the latest development: "we have been advocating for something like this for a number of years, and it is very exciting to finally see the release of Work Graphs."

AMD has caught up with NVIDIA and Intel in the race to get a locally run AI chatbot up and running on its respective hardware. Team Red's community hub welcomed a new blog entry on Wednesday—AI staffers published a handy "How to run a Large Language Model (LLM) on your AMD Ryzen AI PC or Radeon Graphics Card" step-by-step guide. They recommend that interested parties are best served by downloading the correct version of LM Studio. Their CPU-bound Windows variant—designed for higher-end Phoenix and Hawk Point chips—compatible Ryzen AI PCs can deploy instances of a GPT based LLM-powered AI chatbot. The LM Studio ROCm technical preview functions similarly, but is reliant on Radeon RX 7000 graphics card ownership. Supported GPU targets include: gfx1100, gfx1101 and gfx1102.

AMD believes that: "AI assistants are quickly becoming essential resources to help increase productivity, efficiency or even brainstorm for ideas." Their blog also puts a spotlight on LM Studio's offline functionality: "Not only does the local AI chatbot on your machine not require an internet connection—but your conversations stay on your local machine." The six-step guide invites curious members to experiment with a handful of large language models—most notably Mistral 7b and LLAMA v2 7b. They thoroughly recommend that you select options with "Q4 K M" (AKA 4-bit quantization). You can learn about spooling up "your very own AI chatbot" here.

AMD Linux engineers have been working on "GFX1150" and "GFX1151" targets for a while—official references to "Strix 1/Strix Point" and "Strix Point Halo" have appeared several times on official development channels. Phoronix's head honcho—Michael Larabel—monitors these activities with keen interest, his latest finding indicates that Team Red is preparing open-source RadeonSI/RADV driver support for the GFX1151 IP. Their MESA 24.1 update merges in GPU enablement for possible high-end "Strix Point Halo" laptop processors—tech tipsters believe that these chiplet variants could sport up to sixteen Zen 5 CPU cores and forty RDNA 3.5 GPU cores.

AMD's enablement of the "GFX1150/Strix Point" GPU appeared online late last month—these monolithic laptop chips are alleged to sit below "Strix Point Halo" in Team Red's product hierarchy. Insiders suggest that the best configurations could house twelve Zen 5 CPU cores and sixteen RDNA 3.5 GPU cores. Phoronix posited that the "RDNA 3 refresh" graphics solution: "is just rumored for select APUs, while ultimately we'll see where this GFX 11.5.1 IP is found if for some further upgraded APU or something more special. In any event the open-source Linux driver support is coming together." According to official product roadmaps, the initial batch of "Strix Point" mobile chips are expected ship later this year—representing a proper next-gen upgrade over current "Hawk Point" offerings.

The TinyBox AI server system attracted plenty of media attention last week—its creator, George Hotz, decided to build with AMD RDNA 3.0 GPU hardware rather than the expected/traditional choice of CDNA 3.0. Tiny Corp. is a startup firm dealing in neural network frameworks—they currently "write and maintain tinygrad." Hotz & Co. are in the process of assembling rack-mounted 12U TinyBox systems for customers—an individual server houses an AMD EPYC 7532 processor and six XFX Speedster MERC310 Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards. The Tiny Corp. social media account has engaged in numerous NVIDIA vs. AMD AI hardware debates/tirades—Hotz appears to favor the latter, as evidenced in his latest choice of components. ROCm support on Team Red AI Instinct accelerators is fairly mature at this point in time, but a much newer prospect on gaming-oriented graphics cards.

Tiny Corporation's unusual leveraging of Radeon RX 7900 XTX GPUs in a data center configuration has already hit a developmental roadblock. Yesterday, the company's social media account expressed driver-related frustrations in a public forum: "If AMD open sources their firmware, I'll fix their LLVM spilling bug and write a fuzzer for HSA. Otherwise, it's not worth putting tons of effort into fixing bugs on a platform you don't own." Hotz's latest complaint was taken onboard by AMD's top brass—Dr. Lisa Su responded with the following message: "Thanks for the collaboration and feedback. We are all in to get you a good solution. Team is on it." Her software engineers—within a few hours—managed to fling out a set of fixes in Tiny Corporation's direction. Hotz appreciated the quick turnaround, and proceeded to run a model without encountering major stability issues: "AMD sent me an updated set of firmware blobs to try. They are responsive, and there have been big strides in the driver in the last year. It will be good! This training run is almost 5 hours in, hasn't crashed yet." Tiny Corp. drummed up speculation about AMD open sourcing GPU MES firmware—Hotz disclosed that he will be talking (on the phone) to Team Red leadership.

The latest version of AMD's open-source GPU compute stack, ROCm, is due for launch soon according to a Phoronix article—chief author, Michael Larabel, has been poring over Team Red's public GitHub repositories over the past couple of days. AMD ROCm version 6.0 was released last December—bringing official support for the AMD Instinct MI300A/MI300X, alongside PyTorch improvements, expanded AI libraries, and many other upgrades and optimizations. The v6.0 milestone placed Team Red in a more competitive position next to NVIDIA's very mature CUDA software layer. A mid-February 2024 update added support for Radeon PRO W7800 and RX 7900 GRE GPUs, as well as ONNX Runtime.

Larabel believes that "ROCm 6.1" is in for an imminent release, given his tracking of increased activity on publicly visible developer platforms: "For MIPOpen 3.1 with ROCm 6.1 there's been many additions including new solvers, an AI-based parameter prediction model for the conv_hip_igemm_group_fwd_xdlops solver, numerous fixes, and other updates. AMD MIGraphX will see an important update with ROCm 6.1. For the next ROCm release, MIGraphX 2.9 brings FP8 support, support for more operators, documentation examples for Whisper / Llama-2 / Stable Diffusion 2.1, new ONNX examples, BLAS auto-tuning for GEMMs, and initial code for MIGraphX running on Microsoft Windows." The change-logs/documentation updates also point to several HIPIFY for ROCm 6.1 improvements—including the addition of CUDA 12.3.2 support.

Brett Simpson, Partner and Co-Founder of Arete Research, sat down with AMD CTO Mark Papermaster during the former's "Investor Webinar Conference." A transcript of the Arete + AMD question and answer session appeared online last week—the documented fireside chat concentrated mostly on "AI compute market" topics. Papermaster was asked about his company's competitive approach when taking on NVIDIA's very popular range of A100 and H100 AI GPUs, as well as the recently launched GH200 chip. The CTO did not reveal any specific pricing strategies—a "big picture" was painted instead: "I think what's important when you just step back is to look at total cost of ownership, not just one GPU, one accelerator, but total cost of ownership. But now when you also look at the macro, if there's not competition in the market, you're going to see not only a growth of the price of these devices due to the added content that they have, but you're -- without a check and balance, you're going to see very, very high margins, more than that could be sustained without a competitive environment."

Papermaster continued: "And what I think is very key with -- as AMD has brought competition market for these most powerful AI training and inference devices is you will see that check and balance. And we have a very innovative approach. We've been a leader in chiplet design. And so we have the right technology for the right purpose of the AI build-out that we do. We have, of course, a GPU accelerator. But there's many other circuitry associated with being able to scale and build out these large clusters, and we're very, very efficient in our design." Team Red started to ship its flagship accelerator, Instinct MI300X, to important customers at the start of 2024—Arete Research's Simpson asked about the possibility of follow-up models. In response, AMD's CTO referenced some recent history: "Well, I think the first thing that I'll highlight is what we did to arrive at this point, where we are a competitive force. We've been investing for years in building up our GPU road map to compete in both HPC and AI. We had a very, very strong harbor train that we've been on, but we had to build our muscle in the software enablement."

According to a Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2024 schedule page, Microsoft is planning to present next-gen technologies with their upcoming "DirectX State of the Union Ft. Work Graphs and Introducing DirectSR" presentation. Shawn Hargreaves, Direct3D's Development Manager and Austin Kinross (PIX Developer Lead, Microsoft) are scheduled to discuss matters with representatives from NVIDIA and AMD. Wessam Bahnassi, a "20-year veteran in 3D engine design and optimization," is Team Green's Principal Engineer of Developer Technology. Rob Martin, a Fellow Software Engineer, will be representing all things Team Red—where he leads development on implementations for GPU Work Graphs. According to GDC, the intended audience will be: "graphics developers or technical directors from game studios or engine companies."

Earlier this month, an "Automatic super resolution" feature was discovered in Windows 11 Insider Preview build (24H2)—the captioned part stated: "use AI to make supported games play more smoothly with enhanced details," although further interface options granted usage in desktop applications as well. Initial analysis and user impressions indicated that Microsoft engineers had created a proprietary model, separate from familiar technologies: NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS. It is interesting to note that Team Blue is not participating in the upcoming March 21 "DirectX State of the Union" panel discussion (a sponsored session). GDC's event description states (in full): "The DirectX team will showcase the latest updates, demos, and best practices for game development with key partners from AMD and NVIDIA. Work graphs are the newest way to take full advantage of GPU hardware and parallelize workloads. Microsoft will provide a preview into DirectSR, making it easier than ever for game devs to scale super resolution support across Windows devices. Finally, dive into the latest tooling updates for PIX."

COMPUTEX 2024, a global leading technology exhibition, featuring AIoT applications, generative AI & and startup ecosystems, will take place from June 4th to 7th at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center Halls 1 and 2. Themed "Connecting AI," this year's exhibition focuses on the latest global AI technologies and industry trends. The show will attract 1,500 international and local exhibitors using 4,500 booths. The Opening Keynote will be delivered by Dr. Lisa Su, Chair and CEO of AMD, on the morning of June 3rd to set the stage for the event.

COMPUTEX 2024: Global Tech Giants Unite, Paving the Way for the Era of the AI Ecosystem
2024 is acclaimed as the AI PC era, with the development of artificial intelligence propelling products like AI PCs, AI servers, and AI smartphones to thrive in the market. This year's COMPUTEX covers six major themes: AI computing, Advanced Connectivity, Future Mobility, Immersive Reality, Sustainability, and Innovations. Collaborating with international technology powerhouses, including Acer, ASRock, ASUS, Delta, Gigabyte, G.Skill, Intel, MSI, Pro Gamersware, and more, shapes the AI ecosystem. Moreover, the InnoVEX exhibit for startups will connect innovative teams from around the globe, sparking cross-industry collaboration and revitalizing AI technology with fresh energy.

The mysterious Zen 6 "Morpheus" processor architecture was leaked accidentally by an AMD engineer's LinkedIn profile—news outlets picked up on this information last April. Naturally, Team Red's next priority is Zen 5—the latest reports suggest that two different chiplet designs are penciled in for mass production within the second quarter of 2024. Last September, insiders claimed that a proposed EPYC 9006 "Venice" CPU series was based on the sixth-gen microarchitecture. Everest/Olrak_29 has revealed various bits of speculative material regarding futuristic "Ryzen Client" processor designs since the start of 2024.

The latest postings to social media posit that AMD has selected an RDNA 5-based integrated graphics solution (possibly occupying a tile), thus "skipping RDNA 4" on their "Medusa" lineup of Ryzen Client processors. Leaked Microsoft documents revealed that its Xbox hardware design division was considering RDNA 5 for next-gen console specs. Medusa's CPU aspect is allegedly populated by Zen 6 "Morpheus" cores—as claimed in a January tweet. A new package design was also riffed on at the time: "Yes, I have teased this before...Medusa will use 2.5D interconnect with a much higher bandwidth," instead of a "traditional" multi-die design. Industry speculation has AMD's Zen 6 client architecture linked to a loose 2025/2026 launch window.

It seems that AMD and its board partners are continuing to rollout new custom graphics cards based on the formerly China market exclusive Radeon RX 7900 GRE 16 GB GPU—PowerColor unleashed its fiendish flagship Red Devil model as one of last September's launch options. Their Chinese website has been updated with another Navi 31 XL entry—Hellhound Radeon RX 7900 GRE OC. This design sits below the Red Devil in the company's graphics card product and pricing hierarchy; providing excellent cooling performance with fewer frills. The latest custom RX 7900 GRE card borrows PowerColor's existing demonic dog design from the mid-tier Hellhound RX 7800 XT and RX 7700 XT models. The Hellhound enclosure deployed on Radeon RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT GPUs is a much chunkier affair.

The PowerColor Hellhound Radeon RX 7900 GRE OC has also popped up on a couple of UK and mainland Europe price comparison engines (published 2024-01-30), so it possible that a very limited release could occur across a small smattering of countries and retail channels—Proshop Denmark seems to be the first place with cards in stock, pricing is €629.90 (~$682) at the time of writing. The Radeon RX 7900 GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition) GPU sits in an awkward spot between the fancier Navi 31 options, and Navi 32 siblings—AMD and its AIB partners have reduced MSRPs in Europe, possibly in reaction to the recent launch of NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 40 SUPER series. We are not sure if this initiative has boosted the RX 7900 GRE's popularity in this region, since very few outlets actually offer the (XFX-produced) reference model or Sapphire's Pulse custom design.

According to a recent MyDrivers news piece, graphics card models based on AMD's China-exclusive Radeon RX 6750 GRE GPU are "selling like hotcakes" in the region. Team Red's Radeon RX 6750 GRE was released last October, and made available in two memory configurations: 10 GB with a recommended starting price of 2219 RMB (~$312), and 12 GB going for 2379 RMB (~$335). Industry experts were surprised to hear about the mid-range Navi 22 (RDNA 2) GRE card becoming a popular choice in mainstream and budget-conscious gaming circles—as of early January, AMD has taken the unusual step of delaying its Radeon RX 7600 XT launch in China.

Chinese hardware news outlets are reporting that the 12 GB variant is selling for as low as 2239 RMB (~$315) at select retail sites—customers are reported to be snapping these cards up due to an irresistible "price-to-performance ratio," despite onboard technology being almost three years old. AMD is reported to be implementing a "strict" price control policy to prevent unbalanced supply conditions—Wccftech suggests that adjustment "instructions" have been sent out to AIB partners. The MyDrivers article points out that the policy adjustments will take time to stabilize Radeon RX 6750 GRE prices—the aforementioned 2239 RMB shop offers were still live late last week (report is dated January 26).