[The Exiled]

New AMD Instinct MI300 details emerge, debuts in 2 Exaflop El Capitan Supercomputer

24-core Zen 4 CPU, CDNA 3 GPU, and 128GB of HBM3 all in one package, what's not to like? AMD's Instinct MI300 is shaping up to be an incredible chip with CPU and GPU cores and a hefty slab of high-speed memory brought together on the same processor, but details have remained slight. Now we've gathered some new details from an International Super Computing (ISC) 2023 presentation that outlines the coming two-exaflop El Capitan supercomputer that will be powered by the Instinct MI300. We also found other details in a keynote from AMD's CTO Mark Papermaster at ITF World 2023, a conference hosted by research giant imec (you can read our interview with Papermaster here).

The El Capitan supercomputer is poised to be the fastest in the world when it powers on in late 2023, taking the leadership position from the AMD-powered Frontier. AMD's powerful Instinct MI300 will power the machine, and new details include a topology map of a MI300 installation, pictures of AMD's Austin MI300 lab, and a picture of the new blades that will be employed in the El Capitan supercomputer. We'll also cover some of the other new developments around the El Capitan deployment. As a reminder, the Instinct MI300 is a data center APU that blends a total of 13 chiplets, many of them 3D-stacked, to create a single chip package with twenty-four Zen 4 CPU cores fused with a CDNA 3 graphics engine and eight stacks of HBM3 memory totaling 128GB. Overall the chip weighs in with 146 billion transistors, making it the largest chip AMD has pressed into production. The nine compute dies, a mix of 5nm CPUs and GPUs, are 3D-stacked atop four 6nm base dies that are active interposers that handle memory and I/O traffic, among other functions.

With development continuing on a predictable cadence, it's clear that El Capitan is well underway to being operational later this year. The MI300 forges a new path for AMD's high-performance compute offerings, but AMD tells us these halo MI300 chips will be expensive and relatively rare -- these are not a high-volume product, so they won't see wide deployment like the EPYC Genoa data center CPUs. However, the tech will filter down to multiple variants in different form factors. The MI300 was also supposed to compete with Intel's Falcon Shores, a chip that was initially designed to feature a varying number of compute tiles with x86 cores, GPU cores, and memory in numerous possible configurations. Intel recently delayed them to 2025 and redefined the chips to feature a GPU and AI architecture only — they will now not feature CPU cores. In effect, that leaves Intel without a direct competitor for the Instinct MI300.

Izvor: Tom's Hardware