AMD (AMD) launched its latest artificial intelligence chips on Thursday at its Advancing AI 2024 event in San Francisco, California.
The wave of announcements comes as AMD continues to battle AI market leader Nvidia (NVDA) and is looking to take greater market share from its long-time rival, Intel (INTC) in server CPU space.
The company showed off its new 5th Generation AMD EPYC central processing units (CPUs) for servers, provided details on its Instinct MI325X AI accelerator, and demonstrated its Ryzen AI PRO 300 AI PC processors for enterprise customers.
AMD shares fell more than 4% in afternoon trading.
AMD claimed its high-end 5th generation EPYC 9965 chips, which cost $14,813, outperformed Intel’s fifth generation Xeon server chips – with servers running AMD’s processors delivering 4x faster video transcoding times fast; 3.9-fold improvement in information time, the time needed to transform data into usable information for scientific and high-performance computing applications; and 1.6x performance per core in a virtualized infrastructure.
In other words: AMD wants you to know that its chip can outperform Intel’s in certain scenarios.
Intel launched its next-generation Xeon 6 chip in September, but AMD says it hasn’t been able to get its hands on the processor to test it against its EPYC chip.
On the AI accelerator side, AMD offered more details on its MI325X chip. The company claims the data center processor outperforms Nvidia’s popular H200 AI chip in bandwidth and memory capacity, with the MI325X providing 256GB of HBM3E, a form of high-bandwidth memory used in AI processors .
AMD said the MI325X offers 1.8 times the memory capacity of Nvidia’s H200 and 1.3 times the bandwidth. According to the chipmaker, companies including Dell (DELL), Eviden, Gigabyte, HPE (HPE), Lenovo (LNVGF) and Super Micro Computer (SMCI) will begin offering MI325-based platforms in the first quarter of 2025.
The company also announced that it is gearing up for its MI350X, the sequel to the MI325X, which will debut in the second half of next year. Nvidia, meanwhile, is working with customers to deploy its next-generation Blackwell-based AI servers.
The data center has become the new battleground for AMD, Nvidia and Intel, as companies look to take advantage of the ongoing AI gold rush and attract as many customers as possible.
And that translates into big money for AMD and Nvidia. In its most recent quarter, AMD reported record data center revenue of $2.8 billion, up 115% year-over-year. However, we are a long way from Nvidia’s Data Center business, which reported revenue of $26.3 billion, up 154% year over year.
Intel, for its part, is facing a massive turnaround effort as it seeks to regain its footing in the data center business. In its most recent quarter, the company reported that its data center revenue fell 3% year-over-year, falling to $3 billion. The decline is part of a broader trend for Intel, which saw its full-year 2023 data center revenue fall 20% compared to 2022.
In addition to its data center offerings, AMD introduced its new Ryzen AI PRO 300 processors for enterprise PCs. The company claims its high-end version of the PRO 300, the Ryzen AI 9 HX PRO 375, delivers 40% better performance and 14% faster productivity than the Intel Core Ultra 7 165U chip.
But the 165U is one of Intel’s first-generation Core Ultra processors, and the company has already announced its second-generation Core Ultra chips, which Intel says offer both better performance and better battery life than its 165U offerings. first generation.
AMD and Intel continue hopes that AI PCs will boost PC sales, as businesses and commercial customers look to replace aging PCs they purchased early in the pandemic. But so far, these efforts are not bearing much fruit.
According to Gartner, PC shipments fell in the third quarterdespite the hype around AI PCs. However, as the holiday season approaches, businesses have ample opportunity to introduce consumers to the benefits of AI PCs. Whether customers listen is another story.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
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