HPC (High Performance Computing) is a highly demanded
thing today. When it comes to pure computing power for
vast numbercrunching, then classic CPUs cannot achieve
the speed modern GPUs can reach today.

AMD just released the infor that the Instinct MI50 and MI60 are on their way as successor to the Vega MI25.

Fabbed at 7nm they squeeze 13 billion transistors onto a diesize of only 334mm², which gives room for more speculation. As an example the Titan V from NVidia is still fabbed at 10nm and thus their HPC monster has a GPU chip with over 600mm² offering “only” 11 billion transistors.

But enough babbling about die sizes. What does that mean in numbers?

Well, the computing power is measured in FLOPS (Floating Point Operations per seconds). With this chip series, also Integer 8 Byte (INT8) und Integer 4 Byte (INT4) instructions can be processed blazing fast.

In raw numbers:

FP64:     7.4 TFLOPS
FP32:   14.7 TFLOPS
FP16:   29.5 TFLOPS
INT8:   59.2 IOPS
INT4: 118.0 IOPS

Although the FP16-Arithmetics didn’t get a high boost (roughly 20%) the usage of 32GB HBM2 memory allowed the new Instinct cards to perform up to 280% percent faster in benchmarks like Resnet-50, Inception-4 and VGG16 compared to the MI25 cards.

So whatever comes, maybe also Bitcoin and Ethereum miners will sort of benefit from the new computing cards. The release is scheduled for Q4 2018(!) but prices aren’t published yet!

Oh, and one more thing: You definitely will need a PICe4.0 compatible board and processor for these beasts. So you’d better watch for the upcoming EPYC Rome processors from AMD which will natively support PCIe4.0