AMD unveils Radeon Instinct MI60 with Vega at 7 nanometers

In the processor market, AMD and architecture Zen can, for the first time in a long time, compete with arch-rival Intel. When it comes to graphics cards for the higher performance classes and business users, last year’s Vega Frontier Edition belongs to AMD’s top tier, but in terms of performance, the competitor Nvidia’s alternatives in the Quadro and Tesla series are much more powerful.

During the Next Horizon event, AMD will present the Vega-based computing card Radeon Instinct MI60, which is equipped with the world’s first graphics circuit made of 7 nanometers. AMD Radeon Instinct MI60 is part of the same product family as Radeon Instinct MI25 which was unveiled in 2016 and is a plug-in card used to accelerate machine learning and similar calculations.

Under the hood of the Radeon Instinct MI60, 64 computing units and 32 GB of HBM2 memory with error-correcting code (ECC) are supported, with bandwidth of up to 1 TB / s. The theoretical computing power is set at 14.7 TFLOPS for single precision (FP32) and 7.4 TFLOPS for double precision (FP64), which together with its computing units speak for a clock frequency around 1,800 MHz.

In addition, there is support for calculations in semi-precision (FP16), which then gives 29.5 TFLOPS, but the big draw is adaptations for machine learning. Here, a total of 59 TOPS at INT8 and 118 TOPS at INT4 are stated, compared with 56 TOPS and 112 TOPS respectively for Nvidia’s worsting model Tesla V100.

Great importance is attached to the fact that the calculation card is intended for data centers and support for high bandwidth between different parts of the system. Brand new is support for PCI Express 4.0, which doubles the bandwidth to 64 GB / s compared to PCI Express 3.0. At the same time, AMD introduces Infinity Fabric as a bus between several contemporary graphics cards and this has a bandwidth of 100 GB / s. A total of eight Radeon Instinct MI60s can be used in one virtual machine, or 16 virtual machines can share a single card.

The transition to manufacturing of 7 nanometers is said to contribute to a performance increase of over 25 percent at the same power consumption, which at the same clock frequency should be halved. The circuit area of ​​the Radeon Instinct MI60 also measures 331 mm² and has 13.2 billion transistors, compared to 484 mm² and 12.5 billion transistors for Vega 10 at 14 nanometers.

In connection with the presentation of the calculation card, AMD also unveils the ROCm 2.0 software, which is focused on machine learning. The software is open source and compatible with AMD products, as well as processors from Intel and Nvidia’s graphics cards.

According to previous statements, the launch of the Radeon Instinct MI60 with Vega at 7 nanometers will take place until the end of the year.

Read more about Vega at 7 nanometers and the Next Horizon event: