By Arsheeya Bajwa
TAIPEI (Reuters) – Advanced Micro Devices unveiled its latest artificial intelligence processors on Monday and detailed its plan to develop AI chips over the next two years in a bid to compete with industry leader Nvidia.
At the Computex technology show in Taipei, AMD CEO Lisa Su presented the MI325X accelerator, which is expected to be available in the fourth quarter of 2024.
The race to develop generative artificial intelligence programs has led to a growing demand for advanced chips used in AI data centers that can support these complex applications.
AMD, based in Santa Clara, California, competes with Nvidia, which currently dominates the lucrative AI semiconductor market and controls about 80% of its share.
Since last year, Nvidia has made it clear to investors that it plans to shorten its release cycle to one year, and AMD has now followed suit.
“AI is clearly our number one priority as a company and we’ve really leveraged all of the company’s development capabilities to make this happen,” Su told reporters.
“This annual cadence is something that exists because the market demands newer products and capabilities… Every year we have the next big thing, so we always have the most competitive portfolio.”
AMD also introduced an upcoming series of chips titled MI350, which is expected to be available in 2025 and will be based on a new chip architecture.
Compared to the currently available MI300 series of AI chips, AMD said it expects the MI350 to perform 35 times better at inference – the process of calculating generative AI responses. Additionally, AMD revealed the MI400 series, which will arrive in 2026 and will be based on an architecture called “Next.”
Investors who have invested billions of dollars in the picks and shovels trade on Wall Street are looking for longer-term updates from chip companies as they assess the longevity of the booming rally of genAI, which so far has shown no signs of slowing down.
AMD shares have more than doubled since the start of 2023. This rise still pales in comparison to the more than seven-fold increase in Nvidia shares during the same period.
AMD is targeting a one-year AI chip production cycle. Similarly, Nvidia has announced plans to release a new family of AI chips every year.
AMD’s Su said in April that the company forecast AI chip sales of around $4 billion for 2024, an increase of $500 million from its previous estimate.
At the Computex event, AMD also said its latest generation of central processing units (CPUs) would likely be available in the second half of 2024.
While companies generally prioritize AI chips in data centers, some AMD CPUs are used in conjunction with GPUs, although the ratio is skewed toward GPUs.
AMD’s detailed architecture for its new Neural Processing Units (NPUs), dedicated to handling on-device AI tasks in AI PCs.
Chipmakers are banking on additional AI capabilities to drive growth in the PC market as it emerges from a years-long slump.
PC vendors such as HP and Lenovo will release devices with AMD’s PC AI chips. AMD said its processors exceeded Microsoft’s PC Copilot+ requirements.
(Reporting by Arsheeya Bajwa in Bengaluru, Max A Cherney and Ben Blanchard in Taipei; editing by Will Dunham and Rashmi Aich)
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