EuroEXA Update 2020

Several years ago, anecdotal evidence led Hyperion Research to compile a list of applications that promised to be the most economically important HPC-enabled AI use cases. Rather than simply drawing attention as interesting one-off examples, these applications had emerged as repetitive AI workloads that vendors could begin to pursue as emerging market segments. Hyperion Research's recently completed multi-client study of the worldwide HPC market presented a direct opportunity to ask HPC user organizations whether they use or plan to use any of the economically important HPC-enabled AI applications.

During the recent Wells Fargo 2022 TMT Summit, Mark Papermaster, CTO of AMD, reported that the Instinct MI300 accelerated processing unit (APU) is, as of early December 2022, up and running. Currently confined to their in-house lab, the Instinct MI300 will be used in the exascale supercomputer currently in development at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, El Capitan, scheduled to be delivered in 2024. Described by Papermaster as a "true datacenter APU," AMD expects general availability of the processor in 2023. This multi-chiplet processor makes use of both AMD's Zen 4 (x86) CPU architecture and CDNA 3, AMD's GPU architecture, designed specifically with exascale computing in mind, and will be produced by Taiwan's TSCM at the 5nm process node. Papermaster sees this development as an important way to continue introducing greater density and optimization into components now that the sector is no longer in the era of the "old Moore's Law."