Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella praised AMD’s Instinct MI300X AI accelerators, saying they are “best price-to-performance by a huge margin”. Talking up AI during the Build 2024 keynote, Nadella said this is a “golden age of system”. (via CRN) Compared to Moore’s Law, which operates on a two-year cycle, the Neural Scaling law clocks in at six months. Specifically, Williams wrote researchers were able to double its network scalability roughly every six months
More About Microsoft and AMD Instinct MI300X for GPT-4
That speed of evolution, Nadella suggested, was due to the influence of AMD and NVIDIA on the market with their AI accelerators and other product lines. One of the things he did say was that Microsoft has had notable success in its partnership with AMD for instance specifically calling out its Instinct MI300X AI GPU as the best value for GPT-4 inference workloads.
For the recently struggling AMD, this is big stuff — more professionals consider its AI solutions superior to NVIDIA (speaking of which, Ampere specs). and certainly having an endorsement from the Microsoft CEO himself can’t hurt. But the enthusiasm surrounding NVIDIA’s Hopper generation from last year hasn’t necessarily been replicated elsewhere in the industry.
Along with AMD, Nadella said Microsoft is one of the first cloud companies able to offer NVIDIA’s Blackwell B100 and GB200 Superchips to customers because of its deep partnership with the chipmaker. It also reflects a growingly competitive AI computing landscape.
AMD’s CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, was also at the ITF World in Antwerp and picked up an IMEC Innovation award while sharing AMD’s vision for future efficient AI computing as well. Key points included a target of achieving a 100x improvement in performance per watt by 2027, driven by a holistic, system-level approach to design. This strategy involves new architectures, advanced packaging, system-level tuning, and software and hardware co-design. As NVIDIA prepares to scale up its Blackwell production, and AMD is rumored to debut its MI400 lineup, the AI industry is poised for significant developments.
