AMD has hosted the Next Horizon event, dedicated to the company’s future advanced products, in particular, the world’s first graphics processor, based on the 7-nm process technology. This is a new version of the graphics processor Vega. The graphic processor Vega 7nm, as AMD itself calls it, has an area of only 331 mm2, but at the same time, 13.23 billion transistors are located on it.
Compared with the original 14-nm version of the Vega, the new 7-nm version doubled the density of transistors. With the same power consumption, the graphics processor is capable of providing 25% better performance. And at the same frequency, the power consumption of the new product is 50% lower.
AMD introduced the Radeon Instinct MI50 and MI60 computing accelerators on a new graphics processor. Between themselves, these accelerators differ only in the configuration of the GPU, as well as the amount of video memory. The younger Radeon Instinct MI50 is built on a stripped-down version of the Vega 7nm with 3840 stream processors and a clock frequency of up to 1746 MHz. In turn, the Radeon Instinct MI60 offers a full-fledged Vega 7nm with 4096 stream processors and frequencies up to 1800 MHz. The power consumption of both accelerators is 300 watts.
Both updates use HBM2 memory with ECC error correction support. The junior model received 16 GB, while the older AMD allocated 32 GB of memory at once. In both cases, memory with a frequency of 1000 MHz was used, and a 4096-bit wide bus was used to connect it. As a result, the memory bandwidth reaches 1 TB / s.
As for performance, AMD calls the Radeon Instinct MI60 the fastest accelerator for double precision calculations (FP64). Productivity in such operations reaches 7.4 Tflops. In single (FP32) and half (FP16) accuracy operations, the performance indicators are 14.7 and 29.5 teraflops, respectively. Finally, in operations like INT8, the performance reaches 59 TOPS. The Radeon Instinct MI50 has slightly lower performance because of the lower number of stream processors and frequency.
The performance of the new Radeon Instinct MI60 accelerator is comparable to the performance of the NVIDIA Tesla V100 accelerator based on the Volta GPU. And in terms of theoretical performance, expressed in teraflops, AMD’s new product outperforms its competitor a bit, while NVIDIA outweighs the training of neural network in ResNet-50.
Radeon Instinct received support for the interface PCI Express 4.0 x16. It is able to provide bandwidth between a CPU and a GPU up to 64 GB / s in both directions simultaneously. There is also backward compatibility with the PCI Express 3.0 x16 interface.
For communication between GPUs, the Infinity Fabric bus is used with a bandwidth of 100 GB / s per channel. The new video cards have two such channels, that is, the total bandwidth is 200 GB / s.
The new Radeon Instinct accelerators can be used not only for calculations and tasks related to artificial intelligence, but also they support third-generation hardware virtualization. One accelerator supports up to 16 virtual machines, or one virtual machine can utilize up to 8 Radeon Instinct accelerators.
AMD Radeon Instinct MI60 will go on sale in the fourth quarter of 2018. Radeon Instinct MI50 will have to wait until the first quarter of 2019. AMD does not specify the cost of new products, writes 3DNews.