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Oil & gas spotlight: Fueling up with AI

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Oil & gas spotlight: Fueling up with AI

AI is helping industry players that include BP, Chevron and Shell automate a wide range of important use cases. To serve them, AMD and Supermicro offer powerful accelerators and servers.

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What’s artificial intelligence good for? For managers in the oil and gas industry, quite a lot.

Industry players that include Shell, BP, ExxonMobil and Chevron are already using machine learning and AI. Use cases include predictive maintenance, seismic data analysis, reservoir management and safety monitoring, says a recent report by Chirag Bharadwaj of consultants Appinventiv.

AI’s potential benefits for oil and gas companies are substantial. Anurag Jain of AI consultants Oyelabs cites estimates of AI lowering oil production costs by up to $5 a barrel with a 25% productivity gain, and increasing oil reserves by as much as 20% with enhanced resource recovery.

Along the same lines is a recent report from market watcher Global Growth Insights. It says adoption of AI in North American oil shale drilling has increased production efficiency by an impressive 20%.

All this has led Jain of Oyelabs to expect a big increase in the oil and gas industry’s AI spend. He predicts the industry’s worldwide spending on AI will rise from $3 billion last year to nearly $5.3 billion in 2028.

Assuming Jain is right, that would put the oil and gas industry’s AI spend at about 15% of its total IT spend. Last year, the industry spent nearly $20 billion on all IT goods and services worldwide, says Global Growth Insights.

Powerful Solutions

All this AI activity in the oil and gas industry hasn’t passed the notice of AMD and Supermicro. They’re on the case.

AMD is offering the industry its AMD Instinct MI300A, an accelerator that combines CPU cores and GPUs to fuel the convergence of high-performance computing (HPC) with AI. And Supermicro is offering rackmount servers driven by this AMD accelerator.

Here are some of the benefits the two companies are offering oil and gas companies:

  • An APU multi-chip architecture that enables dense compute, high-bandwidth memory integration, and chips for both CPU and GPU all in one.
  • Up to 2.6x the HPC performance/watt vs. the older AMD Instinct MI250X.
  • Up to 5.1x the AI-training workload performance with INT8 vs. the AMD Instinct MI250X. (INT8 is a fixed-point representation using 8 bits.)
  • Up to 128GB of unified HBM3 memory dedicated to GPUs. (HBM3 is a high-bandwidth memory chip technology that offers increased bandwidth, memory capacity and power efficiency, all in a smaller form factor.)
  • Double-precision power up to 122.6 TFLOPS with FP64 matrix HPC performance. (FP64 is a double-precision floating point format using 64 bits in memory.)
  • Complete, pre-validated solutions that are ready for rack-scale deployment on day one. These offer the choice of either 2U (liquid cooled) or 4U (air cooled) form factors.
     

If you have customers in oil and gas looking to get into AI, tell them about these Supermicro and AMD solutions.

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Tech Explainer: What is Quantum Computing, and How Does It Work?

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Tech Explainer: What is Quantum Computing, and How Does It Work?

Quantum computing promises to solve problems faster by simultaneously investigating many possible solutions at once. That’s far easier said than done.

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Quantum computing has the potential to alter life as we know it. If, that is, we can figure out how to make the technology work on a massive scale.

This emerging technology is full of promise. At least in theory, it’s powerful enough to help us cure our most insidious diseases, usher in an era of artificial general intelligence (AGI), and enable us to explore neighboring galaxies.

Way, Way Faster

Quantum computing offers a way to solve these kinds of highly complex problems by simultaneously investigating many possible solutions at once.

To understand why this is so important, imagine a robot that’s attempting to find its way through an enormous maze. First, the robot acts as a human might, investigating each possible route, one at a time. Because the maze is so big and has so many possible pathways, this method could take the robot days, weeks or even years to complete.

Now imagine that instead, the robot can instantaneously clone itself, sending each new instance to investigate a potential route. This method would produce results many orders of magnitude faster than the one-at-a-time method.

And that is the promise offered by quantum computing.

Quantum Mechanics

To do all this heavy lifting, quantum computers behave in ways that may seem mysterious.

As you probably know, today’s standard computers operate using bits—binary switches that at any given moment have a value of either 0 or 1. But quantum computers run differently. They employ qubits (short for quantum bits), each of which can represent 0, 1—or both at the same time.

The ability of a particle-based object to be in two states at once? Yes. It’s a fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics known as superimposition.

Leveraging this ability at the bit level enables quantum computers to significantly reduce the time they need to solve problems. Particularly valuable examples of this include defeating encryption, decoding human physiology, even theorizing the mechanics of light-speed travel.

In other words, Star Trek stuff, pure and simple.

Not So Fast?

So why can’t you buy a quantum computer from your local BestBuy? Turns out that many factors have kept the promise of quantum computing just out of reach.

One of the most prevalent is errors at the qubit level. Qubits have a nasty habit of exchanging information with their environment.

By analogy, imagine spinning a basketball on your fingertip, Harlem Globetrotter style. The fast-spinning ball exists in a delicate state. Even tiny disturbances—such as air currents or ambient vibrations—could make the ball wobble and eventually fall.

A similar situation exists for quantum computers. Small environmental inconsistencies can impact qubits on an exponential scale. In fact, the more qubits you use, the more errors you get. Cross a certain threshold, and eventually the number of errors renders a quantum computer no more powerful than today’s standard computers.

Engineers are making progress in their efforts to solve this problem. For example, a French startup with the unlikely name of Alice & Bob was recently funded to the tune of €100 million to develop a new approach to quantum error correction.

Similarly, Google recently announced Willow, a new quantum computing chip the company says can reduce errors exponentially as it scales up. If a recent blog post by Hartmut Neven, lead of Google Quantum AI, is right, then it would seem Google has solved a 30-year-old challenge in quantum error correction.

The Key: R&D

AMD is also attempting to knock down some common quantum computing roadblocks.

The company filed a patent in 2021 titled “Look Ahead Teleportation for Reliable Computation in Multi-SIMD Quantum Processor.” AMD says this breakthrough improves quantum computing system reliability and reduces the number of required qubits. These efforts could revolutionize quantum computing scalability and error correction.

AMD has also created the Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC, the industry’s only single-chip adaptable radio platform. The Zynq creates high-accuracy, high-speed pulse sequences to control qubits.

Companies like AMD partner Riverlane are using this cutting-edge technology to better control qubits and reduce errors.

When Will We Be There?

Not even a quantum computer can predict the future. But some experts say we could still be 10 to 20 years away from deploying quantum computing on a scale comparable to the ubiquity of the computers we use today.

In the near term, the most powerful tech companies—including AMD and Supermicro—will be working to harness the massive power of qubits.

To achieve their loftiest goals, however, they’ll need to revolutionize scalability and error correction. Only then can we deploy not just hundreds of qubits, but millions.

Once that code is cracked, there’s no telling where we’ll go from there.

 

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AMD Instinct MI300A blends GPU, CPU for super-speedy AI/HPC

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AMD Instinct MI300A blends GPU, CPU for super-speedy AI/HPC

CPU or GPU for AI and HPC? You can get the best of both with the AMD Instinct MI300A.

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The AMD Instinct MI300A is the world’s first data center accelerated processing unit for high-performance computing and AI. It does this by integrating both CPU and GPU cores on a single package.

That makes the AMD Instinct MI300A highly efficient at running both HPC and AI workloads. It also makes the MI300A powerful enough to accelerate training the latest AI models.

Introduced about a year ago, the AMD Instinct MI300A accelerator is shipping soon. So are two Supermicro servers—one a liquid-cooled 2U system, the other an air-cooled 4U—each powered by four MI300A units.

Under the Hood

The technology of the AMD Instinct MI300A is impressive. Each MI300A integrates 24 AMD ‘Zen 4’ x86 CPU cores with 228 AMD CDNA 3 high-throughput GPU compute units.

You also get 128GB of unified HBM3 memory. This presents a single shared address space to CPU and GPU, all of which are interconnected into the coherent 4th Gen AMD Infinity architecture.

Also, the AMD Instinct MI300A is designed to be used in a multi-unit configuration. This means you can connect up to four of them in a single server.

To make this work, each APU has 1 TB/sec. of bidirectional connectivity through eight 128 GB/sec. AMD Infinity Fabric interfaces. Four of the interfaces are dedicated Infinity Fabric links. The other four can be flexibly assigned to deliver either Infinity Fabric or PCIe Gen 5 connectivity.

In a typical four-APU configuration, six interfaces are dedicated to inter-GPU Infinity Fabric connectivity. That supplies a total of 384 GB/sec. of peer-to-peer connectivity per APU. One interface is assigned to support x16 PCIe Gen 5 connectivity to external I/O devices. In addition, each MI300A includes two x4 interfaces to storage, such as M.2 boot drives, plus two USB Gen 2 or 3 interfaces.

Converged Computing

There’s more. The AMD Instinct MI300A was designed to handle today’s convergence of HPC and AI applications at scale.

To meet the increasing demands of AI applications, the APU is optimized for widely used data types. These include FP64, FP32, FP16, BF16, TF32, FP8 and INT8.

The MI300A also supports native hardware sparsity for efficiently gathering data from sparse matrices. This saves power and compute cycles, and it also lowers memory use.

Another element of the design aims at high efficiency by eliminating time-consuming data copy operations. The MI300A can easily offload tasks easily between the CPU and GPU. And it’s all supported by AMD’s ROCm 6 open software platform, built for HPC, AI and machine learning workloads.

Finally, virtualized environments are supported on the MI300A through SR-IOV to share resources with up to three partitions per APU. SR-IOV—short for single-root, input/output virtualization—is an extension of the PCIe spec. It allows a device to separate access to its resources among various PCIe functions. The goal: improved manageability and performance.

Fun fact: The AMD Instinct MI300A is a key design component of the El Capitan supercomputer recently dedicated by Lawrence Livermore Labs. This system can process over two quintillion (1018) calculations per second.

Supermicro Servers

As mentioned above, Supermicro now offers two server systems based on the AMD Instinct MI300A APU. They’re 2U and 4U systems.

These servers both take advantage of AMD’s integration features by combining four MI300A units in a single system. That gives you a total of 912 GPUs, 96 CPUs, and 512GB of HBM3 memory.

Supermicro says these systems can push HPC processing to Exascale levels, meaning they’re very, very fast. “Flop” is short for floating point operations per second, and “exa” indicates a 1 with 18 zeros after it. That’s fast.

Supermicro’s 2U server (model number AS -2145GH-TNMR-LCC) is liquid-cooled and aimed at HPC workloads. Supermicro says direct-to-chip liquid-cooling technology enables a nice TCO with over 51% data center energy cost savings. The company also cites a 70% reduction in fan power usage, compared with air-cooled solutions.

If you’re looking for big HPC horsepower, Supermicro’s got your back with this 2U system. The company’s rack-scale integration is optimized with dual AIOM (advanced I/O modules) and 400G networking. This means you can create a high-density supercomputing cluster with as many as 21 of Supermicro’s 2U systems in a 48U rack. With each system combining four MI300A units, that would give you a total of 84 APUs.

The other Supermicro server (model number AS -4145GH-TNMR) is an air-cooled 4U system, also equipped with four AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators, and it’s intended for converged HPC-AI workloads. The system’s mechanical airflow design keeps thermal throttling at bay; if that’s not enough, the system also has 10 heavy-duty 80mm fans.

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AMD’s new ROCm 6.3 makes GPU programming even better

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AMD’s new ROCm 6.3 makes GPU programming even better

AMD recently introduced version 6.3 of ROCm, its open software stack for GPU programming. New features included expanded OS support and other optimizations.

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There’s a new version of AMD ROCm, the open software stack designed to enable GPU programming from low-level kernel all the way up to end-user applications.  

The latest version, ROCm 6.3, adds features that include expanded operating system support, an open-source toolkit and more.

Rock On

AMD ROCm provides the tools for HIP (the heterogeneous-computing interface for portability), OpenCL and OpenMP. These include compilers, APIs, libraries for high-level functions, debuggers, profilers and runtimes.

ROCm is optimized for Generative AI and HPC applications, and it’s easy to migrate existing code into. Developers can use ROCm to fine-tune workloads, while partners and OEMs can integrate seamlessly with AMD to create innovative solutions.

The latest release builds on ROCm 6, which AMD introduced last year. Version 6 added expanded support for AMD Instinct MI300A and MI300X accelerators, key AI support features, optimized performance, and an expanded support ecosystem.

The senior VP of AMD’s AI group, Vamsi Boppana, wrote in a recent blog post: “Our vision is for AMD ROCm to be the industry’s premier open AI stack, enabling choice and rapid innovation.”

New Features

Here’s some of what’s new in AMD ROCm 6.3:

  • rocJPEG: A high-performance JPEG decode SDK for AMD GPUs.
  • ROCm compute profiler and system profiler: Previously known as Omniperf and Omnitrace, these have been renamed to reflect their new direction as part of the ROCm software stack.
  • Shark AI toolkit: This open-source toolkit is for high-performance serving of GenAI and  LLMs. Initial release includes support for the AMD Instinct MI300.
  • PyTorch 2.4 support: PyTorch is a machine learning library used for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing. Originally developed by Meta AI, it’s now part of the Linux Foundation umbrella.
  • Expanded OS support: This includes added support for Ubuntu 24.04.2 and 22.04.5; RHEL 9.5; and Oracle Linux 8.10. In addition, ROCm 6.3.1 includes support for both Debian 12 and the AMD Instinct MI325X accelerator.
  • Documentation updates: ROCm 6.3 offers clearer, more comprehensive guidance for a wider variety of use cases and user needs.

Super for Supermicro

Developers can use ROCm 6.3 to create tune workloads and create solutions for Supermicro GPU systems based on AMD Instinct MI300 accelerators.

Supermicro offers three such systems:

Are your customers building AI and HPC systems? Then tell them about the new features offered by AMD ROCm 6.3.

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2024: A look back at the year’s best

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2024: A look back at the year’s best

Let's look back at 2024, a year when AI was everywhere, AMD introduced its 5th Gen EPYC processors, and Supermicro led with liquid cooling.

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You couldn't call 2024 boring.

If anything, the year was almost too exciting, too packed with important events, and moving much too fast.

Looking back, a handful of 2024’s technology events stand out. Here are a few of our favorite things.

AI Everywhere

In March AMD’s chief technology officer, Mark Papermaster, made some startling predictions that turned out to be absolutely true.

Speaking at an investors’ event sponsored by Arete Research, Papermaster said, “We’re thrilled to bring AI across our entire product portfolio.” AMD has indeed done that, offering AI capabilities from PCs to servers to high-performance GPU accelerators.

Papermaster also said the buildout of AI is an event as big as the launch of the internet. That certainly sounds right.

He also said AMD believes the total addressable market for AI through 2027 to be $400 billion. If anything, that was too conservative. More recently, consultants Bain & Co. predicted that figure will reach $780 billion to $990 billion.

Back in March, Papermaster said AMD had increased its projection for full-year AI sales from $2 billion to $3.5 billion. That’s probably too low, too.

AMD recently reported revenue of $3.5 billion for its data-center group for just the third quarter alone. The company attributed at least some of the group’s 122% year-on-year increase to the strong ramp of AMD Instinct GPU shipments.

5th Gen AMD EPYC Processors

October saw AMD introduce the fifth generation of its powerful line of EPYC server processors.

The 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors use the company’s new ‘Zen 5’ core architecture. It includes over 25 SKUs offering anywhere from 8 to 192 cores. And the line includes a model—the AMD EPYC 9575F—designed specifically to work with GPU-powered AI solutions.

The market has taken notice. During the October event, AMD CEO Lisa Su told the audience that nearly one in three servers worldwide (34%) are now powered by AMD EPYC processors. And Supermicro launched its new H14 line of servers that will use the new EPYC processors.

Supermicro Liquid Cooling

As servers gain power to add AI and other compute-intensive capabilities, they also run hotter. For data-center operators, that presents multiple challenges. One big one is cost: air conditioning is expensive. What’s more, AC may be unable to cool the new generation of servers.

Supermicro has a solution: liquid cooling. For some time, the company has offered liquid cooling as a data-center option.

In November the company took a new step in this direction. It announced a server that comes with liquid cooling only.

The server in question is the Supermicro 2U 4-node FlexTwin, model number AS -2126FT-HE-LCC. It’s a high-performance, hot-swappable, high-density compute system designed for HPC workloads.

Each 2U system comprises 4 nodes, and each node is powered by dual AMD EPYC 9005 processors. (The previous-gen AMD EPYC 9004s are supported, too.)

To keep cool, the FlexTwin server uses a direct-to-chip (D2C) cold plate liquid cooling setup. Each system also runs 16 counter-rotating fans. Supermicro says this cooling arrangement can remove up to 90% of server-generated heat.

AMD Instinct MI325X Accelerator

A big piece of AMD’s product portfolio for AI is its Instinct line of accelerators. This year the company promised to maintain a yearly cadence of new Instinct models.

Sure enough, in October the company introduced the AMD Instinct MI325X Accelerator. It’s designed for Generative AI performance and working with large language models (LLMs). The system offers 256GB of HBM3E memory and up to 6TB/sec. of memory bandwidth.

Looking ahead, AMD expects to formally introduce the line’s next member, the AMD Instinct MI350, in the second half of next year. AMD has said the new accelerator will be powered by a new AMD CDNA 4 architecture, and will improve AI inferencing performance by up to 35x compared with the older Instinct MI300.

Supermicro Edge Server

A lot of computing now happens at the edge, far beyond either the office or corporate data center.

Even more edge computing is on tap. Market watcher IDC predicts double-digit growth in edge-computing spending through 2028, when it believes worldwide sales will hit $378 billion.

Supermicro is on it. At the 2024 MWC, held in February in Barcelona, the company introduced an edge server designed for the kind of edge data centers run by telcos.

Known officially as the Supermicro A+ Server AS -1115SV-WTNRT, it’s a 1U short-depth server powered by a single AMD EPYC 8004 processor with up to 64 cores. That’s edgy.

Happy Holidays from all of us at Performance Intensive Computing. We look forward to serving you in 2025.

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Supermicro JumpStart remote test site adds latest 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors

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Supermicro JumpStart remote test site adds latest 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors

Register now to test the Supermicro H14 2U Hyper with dual AMD EPYC 9965 processors from the comfort and convenience of your office.

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Supermicro’s JumpStart remote test site will soon let you try out a server powered by the new 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors from any location you choose.

The server is the Supermicro H14 2U Hyper with dual AMD EPYC 9965 processors. It will be available for remote testing on the Supermicro JumpStart site starting on Dec. 2. Registration is open now.

The JumpStart site lets you use a Supermicro server solution online to validate, test and benchmark your own workloads, or those of your customers. And using JumpStart is free.

All test systems on JumpStart are fully configured with SSH (the Secure Socket Shell network protocol); VNC (Virtual Network Computing remote-access software); and Web IPMI (the Intelligent Platform Management Interface). During your test, you can open one session of each.

Using the Supermicro JumpStart remote testing site is simple:

Step 1: Select the system you want to test, and the time slot when you want to test it.

Step 2: At the scheduled time, login to the JumpStart site using your Supermicro single sign-on (SSO) account. If you don’t have an account yet, create one and then use it to login to JumpStart. (Creating an account is free.)

Step 3: Use the JumpStart site to validate, test and benchmark your workloads!

Rest assured, Supermicro will protect your privacy. Once you’re done testing a system on JumpStart, Supermicro will manually erase the server, reflash the BIOS and firmware, and re-install the OS with new credentials.

Hyper power

The AMD-powered server recently added to JumpStart is the Supermicro H14 2U Hyper, model number AS -2126HS-TN. It’s powered by dual AMD EPYC 9965 processors. Each of these CPUs offers 192 cores and a maximum boost clock of 3.7 GHz.

This Supermicro server also features 3.8TB of storage and 1.5TB of memory. The system is built in the 2U rackmount form factor.

Are you eager to test this Supermicro server powered by the latest AMD EPYC CPUs? JumpStart is here to help you.

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Supermicro FlexTwin now supports 5th gen AMD EPYC CPUs

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Supermicro FlexTwin now supports 5th gen AMD EPYC CPUs

FlexTwin, part of Supermicro’s H14 server line, now supports the latest AMD EPYC processors — and keeps things chill with liquid cooling.

 

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Wondering about the server of the future? It’s available for order now from Supermicro.

The company recently added support for the latest 5th Gen AMD EPYC 9005 Series processors on its 2U 4-node FlexTwin server with liquid cooling.

This server is part of Supermicro’s H14 line and bears the model number AS -2126FT-HE-LCC. It’s a high-performance, hot-swappable and high-density compute system.

Intended users include oil & gas companies, climate and weather modelers, manufacturers, scientific researchers and research labs. In short, anyone who requires high-performance computing (HPC).

Each 2U system comprises four nodes. And each node, in turn, is powered by a pair of 5th Gen AMD EPYC 9005 processors. (The previous-gen AMD EPYC 9004 processors are supported, too.)

Memory on this Supermicro FlexTwin maxes out at 9TB of DDR5, courtesy of up to 24 DIMM slots. Expansions connect via PCIe 5.0, with one slot per node the standard and more available as an option.

The 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors, introduced last month, are designed for data center, AI and cloud customers. The series launched with over 25 SKUs offering up to 192 cores and all using AMD’s new “Zen 5” or “Zen 5c” architectures.

Keeping Cool

To keep things chill, the Supermicro FlexTwin server is available with liquid cooling only. This allows the server to be used for HPC, electronic design automation (EDA) and other demanding workloads.

More specifically, the FlexTwin server uses a direct-to-chip (D2C) cold plate liquid cooling setup, and each system also runs 16 counter-rotating fans. Supermicro says this cooling arrangement can remove up to 90% of server-generated heat.

The server’s liquid cooling also covers the 5th gen AMD processors’ more demanding cooling requirements; they’re rated at up to 500W of thermal design power (TDP). By comparison, some members of the previous, 4th gen AMD EPYC processors have a default TDP as low as 200W.

Build & Recycle

The Supermicro FlexTwin server also adheres to the company’s “Building Block Solutions” approach. Essentially, this means end users purchase these servers by the rack.

Supermicro says its Building Blocks let users optimize for their exact workload. Users also gain efficient upgrading and scaling.

Looking even further into the future, once these servers are ready for an upgrade, they can be recycled through the Supermicro recycling program.

In Europe, Supermicro follows the EU’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive. In the U.S., recycling is free in California; users in other states may have to pay a shipping charge.

Put it all together, and you’ve got a server of the future, available to order today.

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Tech Explainer: What is the AMD “Zen” core architecture?

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Tech Explainer: What is the AMD “Zen” core architecture?

Originally launched in 2017, this CPU architecture now delivers high performance and efficiency with ever-thinner processes.

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The recent release of AMD’s 5th generation processors—formerly codenamed Turin—also heralded the introduction of the company’s “Zen 5” core architecture.

“Zen” is AMD’s name for a design ethos that prioritizes performance, scalability and efficiency. As any CTO will tell you, these 3 aspects are crucial for success in today’s AI era.

AMD originally introduced its “Zen” architecture in 2017 as part of a broader campaign to steal market share and establish dominance in the all-important enterprise IT space.

Subsequent generations of the “Zen” design have markedly increased performance and efficiency while delivering ever-thinner manufacturing processes.

Now and Zen

Since the “Zen” core’s original appearance in AMD Ryzen 1000-series processors, the architecture’s design philosophy has maintained its focus on a handful of vital aspects. They include:

  • A modular design. Known as Infinity Fabric, it facilitates efficient connectivity among multiple CPU cores and other components. This modular architecture enhances scalability and performance, both of which are vital for modern enterprise IT infrastructure.
  • High core counts and multithreading. Both are common to EPYC and Ryzen CPUs built using the AMD “Zen” core architecture. Simultaneous multithreading enables each core to process 2 threads. In the case of EPYC processors, this makes AMD’s CPUs ideal for multithreaded workloads that include Generative AI, machine learning, HPC and Big Data.
  • Advanced manufacturing processes. These allow faster, more efficient communication among individual CPU components, including multithreaded cores and multilevel caches. Back in 2017, the original “Zen” architecture was manufactured using a 14-nanometer (nm) process. Today’s new “Zen 5” and “Zen 5c” architectures (more on these below) reduce the lithography to just 4nm and 3nm, respectively.
  • Enhanced efficiency. This enables IT staff to better manage complex enterprise IT infrastructure. Reducing heat and power consumption is crucial, too, both in data centers and at the edge. The AMD “Zen” architecture makes this possible by offering enterprise-grade EPYC processors that offer up to 192 cores, yet require a maximum thermal design power (TDP) of only 500W.

The Two-Fold Path

The latest, fifth generation “Zen” architecture is divided into two segments: “Zen 5” and “Zen 5c.”

“Zen 5” employs a 4-nanometer (nm) manufacturing process to deliver up to 128 cores operating at up to 4.1GHz. It’s optimized for high per-core performance.

“Zen 5c,” by contrast, offers a 3nm lithography that’s reserved for AMD EPYC 96xx, 97xx, 98xx, and 99xx series processors. It’s optimized for high density and power efficiency.

The most powerful of these CPUs—the AMD EPYC 9965—includes an astonishing 192 cores, a maximum boost clock speed of 3.7GHz, and an L3 cache of 384MB.

Both “Zen 5” and “Zen 5c” are key components of the 5th gen AMD EPYC processors introduced earlier this month. Both have also been designed to achieve double-digit increases in instructions per clock cycle (IPC) and equip the core with the kinds of data handling and processing power required by new AI workloads.

Supermicro’s Satori

AMD isn’t the only brand offering bold, new tech to harried enterprise IT managers.

Supermicro recently introduced its new H14 servers, GPU-accelerated systems and storage servers powered by AMD EPYC 9005 Series processors and AMD Instinct MI325X Accelerators. A number of these servers also support the new AMD “Turin” CPUs.

The new product line features updated versions of Supermicro’s vaunted Hyper system, Twin multinode servers, and AI-inferencing GPU systems. All are now available with the user’s choice of either air or liquid cooling.

Supermicro says its collection of purpose-built powerhouses represents one of the industry’s most extensive server families. That should be welcome news for organizations intent on building a fleet of machines to meet the highly resource-intensive demands of modern AI workloads.

By designing its next-generation infrastructure around AMD 5th Generation components, Supermicro says it can dramatically increase efficiency by reducing customers’ total data-center footprints by at least two-thirds.

Enlightened IT for the AI Era

While AMD and Supermicro’s advances represent today’s cutting-edge technology, tomorrow is another story entirely.

Keeping up with customer demand and the dizzying pace of AI-based innovation means these tech giants will soon return with more announcements, tools and design methodologies. AMD has already promised a new accelerator, the AMD Instinct MI350, will be formally announced in the second half of 2025.

As far as enterprise CTOs are concerned, the sooner, the better. To survive and thrive amid heavy competition, they’ll need an evolving array of next-generation technology. That will help them reduce their bottom lines even as they increase their product offerings—a kind of technological nirvana.

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AMD intros CPUs, accelerators, networking for end-to-end AI infrastructure -- and Supermicro supports

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AMD intros CPUs, accelerators, networking for end-to-end AI infrastructure -- and Supermicro supports

AMD expanded its end-to-end AI infrastructure products for data centers with new CPUs, accelerators and network controllers. And Supermicro is already offering supporting servers. 

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AMD today held a roughly two-hour conference in San Francisco during which CEO Lisa Su and other executives introduced a new generation of server processors, the next model in the Instinct MI300 Accelerator family, and new data-center networking devices.

As CEO Su told the audience the live and online audience, AMD is committed to offering end-to-end AI infrastructure products and solutions in an open, partner-dependent ecosystem.

Su further explained that AMD’s new AI strategy has 4 main goals:

  • Become the leader in end-to-end AI
  • Create an open AI software platform of libraries and models
  • Co-innovate with partners including cloud providers, OEMs and software creators
  • Offer all the pieces needed for a total AI solution, all the way from chips to racks to clusters and even entire data centers.

And here’s a look at the new data-center hardware AMD announced today.

5th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs

The EPYC line, originally launched in 2017, has become a big success for AMD. As Su told the event audience, there are now more than 950 EPYC instances at the largest cloud providers; also, AMD hardware partners now offer EPYC processors on more than 350 platforms. Market share is up, too: Nearly one in three servers worldwide (34%) now run on EPYC, Su said.

The new EPYC processors, formerly codenamed Turin and now known as the AMD EPYC 9005 Series, are now available for data center, AI and cloud customers.

The new CPUs also have a new core architecture known as Zen5. AMD says Zen5 outperforms the previous Zen4 generation by 17% on enterprise instructions-per-clock and up to 37% on AI and HPC workloads.

The new 5th Gen line has over 25 SKUs, and core count ranges widely, from as few as 8 to as many as 192. For example, the new AMD EPYC 9575F is a 65-core, 5GHz CPU designed specifically for GPU-powered AI solutions.

AMD Instinct MI325X Accelerator

About a year ago, AMD introduced the Instinct MI300 Accelerators, and since then the company committed itself to introducing new models on a yearly cadence. Sure enough, today Lisa Su introduced the newest model, the AMD Instinct MI325X Accelerator.

Designed for Generative AI performance and built on the AMD CDNA3 architecture, the new accelerator offers up to 256GB of HBM3E memory, and bandwidth up to 6TB/sec.

Shipments of the MI325X are set to begin in this year’s fourth quarter. Partner systems with the new AMD accelerator are expected to start shipping in next year’s first quarter.

Su also mentioned the next model in the line, the AMD Instinct MI350, which will offer up to 288GB of HBM3E memory. It’s set to be formally announced in the second half of next year.

Networking Devices

Forrest Norrod, AMD’s head of data-center solutions, introduced two networking devices designed for data centers running AI workloads.

The AMD Pensando Salina DPU is designed for front-end connectivity. It supports thruput of up to 400 Gbps.

The AMD Pensando Pollara 400, designed for back-end networks connecting multiple GPUs, is the industry’s first Ultra-Ethernet Consortium-ready AI NIC.

Both parts are sampling with customers now, and AMD expects to start general shipments in next year’s first half.

Both devices are needed, Norrod said, because AI dramatically raises networking demands. He cited studies showing that connectivity currently accounts for 40% to 75% of the time needed to run certain AI training and inference models.

Supermicro Support

Supermicro is among the AMD partners already ready with systems based on the new AMD processors and accelerator.

Wasting no time, Supermicro today announced new H14 series servers, including both Hyper and FlexTwin systems, that support the 5th gen AMD 9005 EPYC processors and AMD Instinct MI325X Accelerators.

The Supermicro H14 family includes three systems for AI training and inference workloads. Supermicro says the systems can also accommodate the higher thermal requirements of the new AMD EPYC processors, which are rated at up to 500W. Liquid cooling is an option, too.

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The AMD Instinct MI300X Accelerator draws top marks from leading AI benchmark

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The AMD Instinct MI300X Accelerator draws top marks from leading AI benchmark

In the latest MLPerf testing, the AMD Instinct MI300X Accelerator with ROCm software stack beat the competition with strong GenAI inference performance. 

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New benchmarks using the AMD Instinct MI300X Accelerator show impressive performance that surpasses the competition.

This is great news for customers operating demanding AI workloads, especially those underpinned by large language models (LLMs) that require super-low latency.

Initial platform tests using MLPerf Inference v4.1 measured AMD’s flagship accelerator against the Llama 2 70B benchmark. This test is an indication for real-world applications, including natural language processing (NLP) and large-scale inferencing.

MLPerf is the industry’s leading benchmarking suite for measuring the performance of machine learning and AI workloads from domains that include vision, speech and NLP. It offers a set of open-source AI benchmarks, including rigorous tests focused on Generative AI and LLMs.

Gaining high marks from the MLPerf Inference benchmarking suite represents a significant milestone for AMD. It positions the AMD Instinct MI300X accelerator as a go-to solution for enterprise-level AI workloads.

Superior Instincts

The results of the LLaMA2-70B test are particularly significant. That’s due to the benchmark’s ability to produce an apples-to-apples comparison of competitive solutions.

In this benchmark, the AMD Instinct MI300X was compared with NVIDIA’s H100 Tensor Core GPU. The test concluded that AMD’s full-stack inference platform was better than the H100 at achieving high-performance LLMs, a workload that requires both robust parallel computing and a well-optimized software stack.

The testing also showed that because the AMD Instinct MI300X offers the largest GPU memory available—192GB of HBM3 memory—it was able to fit the entire LLaMA2-70B model into memory. Doing so helped to avoid network overhead by preventing model splitting. This, in turn, maximized inference throughput, producing superior results.

Software also played a big part in the success of the AMD Instinct series. The AMD ROCm software platform accompanies the AMD Instinct MI300X. This open software stack includes programming models, tools, compilers, libraries and runtimes for AI solution development on the AMD Instinct MI300 accelerator series and other AMD GPUs.

The testing showed that the scaling efficiency from a single AMD Instinct MI300X, combined with the ROCm software stack, to a complement of eight AMD Instinct accelerators was nearly linear. In other words, the system’s performance improved proportionally by adding more GPUs.

That test demonstrated the AMD Instinct MI300X’s ability to handle the largest MLPerf inference models to date, containing over 70 billion parameters.

Thinking Inside the Box

Benchmarking the AMD Instinct MI300X required AMD to create a complete hardware platform capable of addressing strenuous AI workloads. For this task, AMD engineers chose as their testbed the Supermicro AS -8125GS-TNMR2, a massive 8U complete system.

Supermicro’s GPU A+ Client Systems are designed for both versatility and redundancy. Designers can outfit the system with an impressive array of hardware, starting with two AMD EPYC 9004-series processors and up to 6TB of ECC DDR5 main memory.

Because AI workloads consume massive amounts of storage, Supermicro has also outfitted this 8U server with 12 front hot-swap 2.5-inch NVMe drive bays. There’s also the option to add four more drives via an additional storage controller.

The Supermicro AS -8125GS-TNMR2 also includes room for two hot-swap 2.5-inch SATA bays and two M.2 drives, each with a capacity of up to 3.84TB.

Power for all those components is delivered courtesy of six 3,000-watt redundant titanium-level power supplies.

Coming Soon: Even More AI power

AMD engineers continually push the limits of silicon and human ingenuity to expand the capabilities of their hardware. So it should come as little surprise that new iterations of the AMD Instinct series are expected to be released in the coming months. This past May, AMD officials said they plan to introduce AMD Instinct MI325, MI350 and MI400 accelerators.

Forthcoming Instinct accelerators, AMD says, will deliver advances including additional memory, support for lower-precision data types, and increased compute power.

New features are also coming to the AMD ROCm software stack. Those changes should include software enhancements including kernel improvements and advanced quantization support.

Are you customers looking for a high-powered, low-latency system to run their most demanding HPC and AI workloads? Tell them about these benchmarks and the AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators.

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