AMD releases Radeon Instinct accelerator with Vega GPU in third quarter

AMD also revealed more about its Radeon Instinct accelerators for deep learning applications during the presentation of its Epyc server processors. The three models, the most expensive of which is equipped with a Vega GPU, will be available in the third quarter.

The slides, which have been put online by ComputerBase among others, show that Gigabyte and Supermicro, for example, are hardware partners that will supply Radeon Instinct hardware. AMD also announced that the Radeon Instinct MI25 has a Vega GPU with 64 compute units and therefore has 4096 stream processors.

The card is therefore good for 12.3Tflops at single precision calculations and 24.6Tflops at half precision. The accelerator is equipped with 16GB of HBM2 memory. In terms of specifications and performance, the card is comparable to the Radeon Vega Frontier Edition video card. However, the Instinct variant is not a video card, but an HPC card that is put into servers for deep learning calculations. The card has to compete with Nvidia’s Tesla P100 with Pascal GPU and the new V100 with Volta GPU.

In addition to the MI25, the MI8 and MI6 appear, which respectively have a Fiji and Polaris GPU. AMD already announced details about these models at the end of last year with the announcement of the Instinct cards. Then the manufacturer reported that the top model would be equipped with a Vega GPU, but specific details were not yet known. Extensive information about the Vega architecture is still lacking. AMD will probably announce that when the RX Vega cards for gamers are introduced at the end of July.

AMD showed at the presentation a 2U server rack containing a motherboard with one Epyc processor, combined with four MI25 accelerators. At half precision, that configuration is good for about 100Tflops.