[Originally posted on 11/06/18]
Today in San Francisco, California, AMD held a special event where we announced the newest additions to the Radeon Instinct™ family of compute products. The AMD Radeon Instinct™ MI60 and Radeon Instinct™ MI50 accelerators are the first GPUs in the world that are based on the advanced 7nm FinFET process technology. The ability to go down to 7nm allows us to put more transistors on to an even smaller package than was possible before – in this case, the MI60 contains 13.2 billion transistors on a package size of 331.46mm2, while the previous generation Radeon Instinct™ MI25 had 12.5 billion transistors on a package size of 494.8mm2 – a 58% improvement in number of transistors per mm2. This allows us to provide a more powerful and robust product, capable of tackling a wide range of workloads from training and inference, to high performance computing.
Supercharged Deep Learning Operations – Ideal for Training and Inference
We’ve made numerous improvements on these new products, including optimized deep learning operations. In addition to native half-precision (FP16) performance, the MI60 and MI50 now support INT8 and INT4 operations, delivering up to a whopping 118 TFLOPS of INT4 peak performance on the MI60. The supercharged compute capabilities of these new products are designed to meet today’s demanding system requirements of handling large data efficiently for training complex neural networks and running inference against those neural networks used in deep learning.
World’s Fastest Double Precision PCIe® Based Accelerator
On the other end of the compute spectrum are FP64 calculations primarily used in high performance compute workloads. These types of workloads require extreme accuracy and speed, which the MI60 and MI50 deliver. The Radeon Instinct MI60 is the fastest double precision PCIe® based accelerator1, delivering up to 7.4 TFLOPS of FP64 peak performance, while the MI50 is not far behind at 6.7 TFLOPS. In addition to fast FP64 performance, the MI60 and MI50 both sport full-chip ECC memory3 as well as RAS4. This allows scientists and researchers across several industries including life sciences, energy, automotive and aerospace, government and more to achieve results with both speed and accuracy.
Finely Balanced, Ultra-Scalable Datacenter Solution
Most of the improvements we’ve talked about so far have been at the chip level, but we didn’t stop there. We also have a number of new benefits found beyond the chip as well. We meticulously designed the MI60 and MI50 to deliver finely tuned and balanced performance. We took a look at some of the common bottlenecks found in previous generations and made improvements to ensure your data is processed in the most efficient manner possible. This includes making these cards PCIe® Gen 4* capable, delivering up to 2x more bandwidth (64 GB/s vs. 32 GB/s) than PCIe® Gen 3 when communicating over the bus. In addition to improved performance between GPU and CPU, we’ve also built in to these products a peer-to-peer GPU communication feature called Infinity Fabric™ Link technology. Each card includes two physical Infinity Fabric™ Links allowing you to directly connect four GPUs together in a GPU hive ring and up to two of these hives in an 8 GPU server. Each GPU card provides up to 200 GB/s bandwidth between peer GPUs, which is up to 6x faster than PCIe Gen 3 alone2. We have also doubled memory bandwidth speeds from our previous generation Radeon Instinct MI25 accelerator5, delivering up to 1TB/s memory bandwidth on both the MI50 and MI60 accelerator – the first GPUs to achieve this speed.
With improved performance from both within the GPU and between GPUs and CPUs, these new finely-balanced, ultra-fast and scalable solutions are the ideal datacenter compute solution for all your needs whether they’re inference, training or HPC related.
Learn More About the AMD Radeon Instinct MI60
Learn More About the AMD Radeon Instinct MI50
Learn More About AMD’s “Vega 7nm” Technology
Learn More About ROCm
Warren Eng is a Product Marketing Manager for professional graphics and compute at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied. GD-5
