CPU temperatures are a sore spot for enterprises and fanatics alike, and new releases from the large three chipmakers (Intel, AMD, and Nvidia) are persevering with the development of hovering temperatures and excessive energy attracts. And it seems to be prefer it’s going to remain that approach.
At an occasion held in Korea for AMD’s consumer CPU merchandise, David McAfee, vice chairman and normal supervisor of consumer channel enterprise, was requested concerning the excessive temperatures of the present Ryzen chips, which get extremely popular regardless that they eat much less energy than their Intel counterparts.
McAfee mentioned AMD and its manufacturing companion TSMC are placing a variety of effort into course of expertise. “As extra superior processes are used sooner or later, we consider that the present phenomenon of excessive warmth density shall be maintained or additional intensified. Due to this fact, will probably be essential to discover a approach to successfully eradicate the excessive warmth density generated by such high-density chiplets sooner or later,” he mentioned (translated from Korean).
The dialogue was centered round shoppers, however it has relevance to the server aspect as properly. AMD makes use of the chiplet design of a number of smaller chips with a high-speed interconnect moderately than one giant piece of silicon. As a result of they’re separate bodily chips and are unfold out on the PC board, they inherently generate extra warmth.
Warmth is turning into an more and more problematic problem for knowledge heart operators. Warmth, normally, and elevated density, particularly, are forcing knowledge heart operators into various kinds of cooling, comparable to liquid cooling, as a result of conventional air cooling is just not adequate anymore.
Design can be an element. As transistors get smaller and extra are packed into the identical area as earlier than, warmth is a pure byproduct. It is simply physics, as one AMD contact instructed me.
This downside will inevitably present up on the server aspect. Excessive-end desktop merchandise from each Intel and AMD virtually demand liquid cooling; air cooling is just not viable anymore. And that is on desktop processors, which have six, eight, or perhaps 12 cores. AMD is making server processors with 192 cores. Which means a complete lot extra transistors packed right into a small area that must be cooled.
Intuition MI300 now delivery
AMD’s reply to Nvidia’s knowledge heart GPUs is the Intuition line of repurposed GPUs for high-performance computing and synthetic intelligence. The world’s quickest supercomputer, Frontier, is powered by AMD Epyc CPUs and Intuition MI250 GPU playing cards, and it runs at sooner than one Exaflops of efficiency.
Now AMD informs us that the successor to the MI250, the MI300A, has begun delivery to the assistance construct the Division of Power’s El Capitan Exascale Supercomputer, situated on the Lawrence Livermore Nationwide Laboratory in Northern California. The announcement was made by CEO Lisa Su on a latest name with Wall Avenue analysts to debate AMD’s quarterly earnings. This supercomputer is predicted to hit 2 exaflops when accomplished subsequent yr.
The MI300 was introduced in January at CES, of all locations. There are two merchandise within the household, the MI300A and MI300X. The MI300A is a mix CPU+GPU, very similar to Nvidia’s Grace Hopper superchip. All instructed, it consists of 9 5nm chiplets that is are stacked on prime of 4 6nm chiplets for I/O with a complete of 146 billion transistors, making it one of many largest chips ever made.
The MI300X is a strictly GPU product and is supposed for cloud acceleration, much like Nvidia’s Hopper H100 GPU accelerator. The MI300X has an influence draw of 750W and contains eight GPU chiplets, 192GB of HBM3 reminiscence, and 5.2TB/s of reminiscence bandwidth.
Su mentioned AMD expects its knowledge heart GPU income to be $400 million within the fourth quarter of 2023, with that quantity hitting over $2 billion in 2024. Distinction that with Nvidia, which did $10 billion within the final quarter in knowledge heart gross sales, and it is fairly apparent that this can be a one horse race. For now, AMD nonetheless has bragging rights. It has the quickest supercomputer on the planet, and it’ll probably have the quickest when El Capitan goes dwell, too.
