AMD CEO Lisa Su Highlights Revolutionary Superchip, Predicts Company Will Emerge Victorious
AMD, previously overshadowed by Nvidia in the market, has made a strong comeback by unveiling a new chip that is expected to outshine its rival. The chipmaker has initiated a battle for super chips and is confident of emerging as the winner, according to CEO Lisa Su. She emphasized that AI is the defining mega trend in technology.
MI300X chip and GPU power
AMD is promoting the new MI300X as a miracle circuit aimed at large language models. The chip has one of the most advanced GPUs (graphics processing units) for AI-level computing. GPUs are “very hard to make,” says Su. GPUs are needed to build advanced AI programs, and companies like Sam Altman’s OpenAI use these chips to power their products. The chip will help data centers handle the huge surge in AI-related traffic. Su said: “There’s a huge amount of technology here and it’s the most complex chip we’ve ever built with 153 billion transistors and the whole purpose is to make artificial intelligence much, much easier.”
This puts AMD in the sweet spot, as Sun’s next comment shows. He said: “So everybody who wants to use AI needs more GPUs, and we have a GPU that’s incredibly powerful; very, very powerful; and we think we’re going to be a significant winner in the AI market.”
When asked about the price, Su laughed and said, “It’s not about the price, it’s about how many users we allow.” The price of the chip itself is still unknown. The chip will be available at the end of the year.
Artificial intelligence technology is not something new for AMD. Su says AMD has been working on AI for several years, and now AI will shape the company’s future. He spoke to Yahoo Finance Live.
On the release of the MI300X, Su said, “We are laser-focused on accelerating the adoption of AMD AI platforms in the data center at scale, leading to the release of our Instinct MI300 accelerators, scheduled for later this year.”
The confidence comes from the fact that the Instinct MI300X accelerator has been counted among the most advanced generative artificial intelligence accelerators in the world.
“The MI300X is based on the next-generation AMD CDNA 3 accelerator architecture and supports up to 192 gigabytes of HBM3 memory to provide the compute and memory efficiency needed to train and infer large language models for generative AI workloads,” the company said.
AMD vs Nvidia
Currently, NVIDIA dominates the AI chip market. Its success is reflected in the fact that its shares have skyrocketed – up 163% this year, according to CNBC. The Motley Fool reports that even after the AMD chip was unveiled, its stock fell, even as Nvidia jumped. But before looking at the negative, Bloomberg puts things into perspective – according to investors, AMD’s shares had bid 99% this year.
While investor confidence is important, equally important is the mood of AMD’s management, and that is definitely exuberant, as CEO Su has said.
AMD chip and AI needs
The AMD Instinct MI300 series can accelerate processing for generative artificial intelligence and beyond. Companies that rely on large language models and require massive amounts of data crunching power to answer questions or even create images need this kind of super chip power. Right now, data centers are just barely able to handle the surge, but need better chips to keep up. Currently, Nvidia has taken the lead and is already meeting the demand for these huge workloads.
However, the competition is far from lost. Su said: “We are still very, very early in the life cycle of artificial intelligence.” The market for data center AI accelerators will grow fivefold to more than $150 billion, he added.
How important is the AI market to AMD and Nvidia?.
During last week’s earnings call, Su said the area is the company’s “number one strategic priority,” highlighting it with more than 50 mentions of the word “AI.”
The same sense of urgency was seen at Nvidia about three months ago when it reported earnings. The term “AI” was used more than 80 times in the conference call with analysts.
