While announcing the Q2 earnings report, AMD also disclosed that the next-generation Instinct Alderbaran computing card with the cDNA 2 architecture has begun shipping. The company pointed out at the bottom of the PPT that, as the successor of Instinct MI100 Arcturus, the Instinct MI200 Alderbaran computing card has been delivered to early customers.
It is reported that the AMD CDNA 2 architecture is designed to provide support for Instinct high-performance computing (HPC) accelerator cards. In terms of specifications, it can be seen that AMD made the Instinct MI200 Aldebaran the first to use the multi-chip (MCM) GPU core design, providing customers with up to 256 computing units (CU) and 128GB of HBM2E cache.
As the first chip designed with MCM GPU, Instinct MI200 will directly compete with Intel 7nm Ponte Vecchio and NVIDIA Ampere’s new products. It is worth mentioning that Intel and Nvidia are also actively adopting MCM multi-chip design solutions for next-generation HPC accelerator cards. It is expected that both Ponte Vecchio and Nvidia’s next-generation HPC accelerator cards will come out in 2022.
Closer to home, AMD Instinct MI200 is equipped with a single dual-core Aldebaran GPU chip. The internal part is the main chip and the auxiliary chip, both of which are composed of 8 shaders (SE), and the total is 16 SE. Each shader engine contains 16 sets of full-rate FP64, FP32 and the second-generation matrix engine’s Quiet Garden Unit (CU), which can be used for FP16 and BF16 operations.
Each chip has 128 CU/8192 stream processors, a total of 256 CU/16384 stream processors, supplemented by the new XGMI interconnect design, and each small chip has a VCN 2.6 engine/main IO controller. As for DRAM, AMD has equipped Instinct MI200 with eight channels 1024-bit interface, with a total bus width of 8192-bit, and each interface can support 2GB HBM2e DRAM modules.
If each stack is 16GB, 8 stacks can bring a total of 128GB of HBM2e cache-48GB more than the current Nvidia A100 computing card with 80GB HBM2e cache. Finally, with the first delivery of Instinct MI200 Aldebaran computing cards designed with MCM chips to customers, AMD can consolidate its position and is expected to decentralize the technology to the consumer-grade RNDA 3 graphics card product line in 2022.
