What Amazon will do with the new AMD chips for artificial intelligence
AMD unveiled a new artificial intelligence microchip. The company has ambitions to compete with Nvidia, and seems to have caught the attention of Amazon Web Services. All the details
American semiconductor company Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) yesterday provided new details about an artificial intelligence microchip designed to compete with devices from market leader NVIDIA , but kept to itself the information that everyone would have wanted to know: who will be the buyer. The Reuters agency thought about revealing the customer's identity today: it will most likely be Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division of the e-commerce giant.
But let's go in order.
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT AMD'S NEW CHIP
AMD's new microchip, the MI300X, will start shipping in the third quarter of the year but mass production will start in the fourth. With its 192 gigabytes of storage, it will help tech companies attracted by artificial intelligence keep down the cost of developing ChatGPT-like services. "The more memory you have, the larger the set of models" the chip can handle, AMD chief executive Lisa Su told Reuters .
The company didn't disclose the price of the MI300X, but it did say a less powerful version, the MI300A, would also be available.
COMPETING WITH NVIDIA
Through the MI300X, AMD wants to count more in a market – that of devices for artificial intelligence – literally dominated by NVIDIA with a share of 80-95 percent. The company has no major competitors, aside from Intel, but feels threatened by plans by Google and Amazon to develop their own artificial intelligence chips in-house.
It will not be easy for AMD to gnaw the market share of NVIDIA, which over the years has built a reputation as a reliable supplier not only of semiconductors, but also of software for artificial intelligence, often anticipating the requests of researchers. In fact, AMD also spoke on Tuesday about its ROCm programming software, designed to represent an alternative to NVIDIA's CUDA platform.
THE INTEREST OF AMAZON WEB SERVICES
Amazon Web Services, the world's largest cloud services provider, is considering using AMD's MI300 microchips, although it hasn't made a final decision yet. Dave Brown, vice president of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud division, revealed this to Reuters .
While NVIDIA usually offers cloud operators a complete package (the DGX Cloud platform), AMD guarantees customers more possibilities to select only the parts of the system they are interested in: integration is guaranteed by the use of standard connection types.
In the specific case of Amazon Web Services, the company has made it known that it is not interested in NVIDIA's DGX Cloud platform – from which it still supplies itself with chips – because it prefers to design its own servers by itself.
– Read also: What happens to the Amazon cloud?
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/amazon-microchip-amd/ on Wed, 14 Jun 2023 12:32:46 +0000.