![]() Nvidia had similar issues with its “Maxwell” GPUs two generations ago, which had excellent single precision performance but which were never delivered in a version that had high double precision capabilities. With subsequent Vega processors, AMD is expected to boost the performance of the Vega GPUs on double precision math, starting with the Vega 20 in 2018 if the rumors are right. While the initial Vega 10 GPUs used in the Radeon Instinct GPU accelerators are going to raise a lot of eyebrows and definitely get some market traction in areas where lower-precision math is preferred, they lack the double precision math that many HPC and some AI workloads require. The Vega 10 GPUs, the first in a line of chips that it is pitting against Nvidia’s “Pascal” and “Volta” motors, were previewed in the Radeon Insight Frontier Edition shortly thereafter and formally launched at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics show a week ago along with the commercial Radeon RX graphics cards using the same Vega 10 chips. But the basic compute, memory, and I/O of the hardware that AMD is delivering makes it a contended in its own right, particularly with the help of high bandwidth, low latency InfiniBand networking from Mellanox Technologies.ĪMD has been winding up its one-two punch in compute for years, and fired off the Epyc X86 server processors concurrent with the International Supercomputing 2017 event in Frankfurt in June, but not actually at ISC17 but in its own event in its Austin development labs. While everyone is excited to see competition returning to the CPU and GPU compute arena, the “Naples” Epyc CPUs and “Vega” Radeon Instinct GPUs are new and it is not precisely clear how they will perform on actual applications. There are some pretty important caveats to this statement, of course. AMD has put a very good X86 server processor into the market for the first time in nine years, and it also has a matching GPU that gives its OEM and ODM partners a credible alternative for HPC and AI workload to the combination of Intel Xeons and Nvidia Teslas that dominate hybrid computing these days. In the IT business, just like any other business, you have to try to sell what is on the truck, not what is planned to be coming out of the factories in the coming months and years.
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