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posted by Fnord666 on Monday December 19 2016, @11:24AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-your-father's-hpc-platform dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

At the AMD Tech Summit in Sonoma, Calif., last week (Dec. 7-9), CEO Lisa Su unveiled the company's vision to accelerate machine intelligence over the next five to ten years with an open and heterogeneous computing approach and a new suite of hardware and open-source software offerings.

The roots for this strategy can be traced back to the company's acquisition of graphics chipset manufacturer ATI in 2006 and the subsequent launch of the CPU-GPU hybrid Fusion generation of computer processors. In 2012, the Fusion platform matured into the Heterogeneous Systems Architecture (HSA), now owned and maintained by the HSA Foundation.

Ten years since launching Fusion, AMD believes it has found the killer app for heterogeneous computing in machine intelligence, which is driven by exponential data surges.

"We generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every single day – whether you're talking about Tweets, YouTube videos, Facebook, Instagram, Google searches or emails," said Su. "We have incredible amounts of data out there. And the thing about this data is it's all different – text, video, audio, monitoring data. With all this different data, you really are in a heterogeneous system and that means you need all types of computing to satisfy this demand. You need CPUs, you need GPUs, you need accelerators, you need ASICS, you need fast interconnect technology. The key to it is it's a heterogeneous computing architecture.

"Why are we so excited about this? We've actually been talking about heterogeneous computing for the last ten years," Su continued. "This is the reason we wanted to bring CPUs and GPUs together under one roof and we were doing this when people didn't understand why we were doing this and we were also learning about what the market was and where the market needed these applications, but it's absolutely clear that for the machine intelligence era, we need heterogeneous compute."

Aiming to boost the performance, efficiency, and ease of implementation of deep learning workloads, AMD is introducing a brand-new hardware platform, Radeon Instinct, and new Radeon open source software solutions.

[...] "We are going to address key verticals that leverage a common infrastructure," said Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect of Radeon Technologies Group. "The building block is our Radeon Instinct hardware platform, and above that we have the completely open source Radeon software platform. On top of that we're building optimized machine learning frameworks and libraries."

AMD is also investing in open interconnect technologies for heterogeneous accelerators; the company is a founding member of CCIX, Gen-Z and OpenCAPI.

[...] The AMD Tech Summit is a follow-on to the inaugural summit that debuted last December (2015). That first event was initiated by Raja Koduri as a team-building activity for the newly minted Radeon Technologies Group. The initial team of about 80, essentially hand-picked by Koduri to focus on graphics, met in Sonoma along with about 15 members of the press. The event was expanded this year to accommodate other AMD departments and nearly 100 media and analyst representatives.

-- submitted from IRC


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday December 19 2016, @01:10PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday December 19 2016, @01:10PM (#443106) Journal

    AMD has to get through NVIDIA, which controls most of machine learning right now, as well Intel, Google with its TPUs, and maybe Microsoft (FPGAs).

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  • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday December 19 2016, @10:31PM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Monday December 19 2016, @10:31PM (#443404) Journal

    Intel bought out Altera, second biggest FPGA maker, to leverage their FPGA's for this type of stuff. And interestingly enough, Altera is no more. It's all Intel branded now.