Arshiya Bajwa
TAIPEI (Reuters) – U.S. company Advanced Micro Devices Inc on Monday unveiled its latest artificial intelligence (AI) processor and detailed plans to develop AI chips over the next two years to challenge industry leader Nvidia.
At the Computex technology trade show in Taipei, AMD CEO Lisa Su introduced the MI325X accelerator, which will be available in the fourth quarter of 2024.
The race to develop generative artificial intelligence programs is creating a surge in demand for advanced chips used in AI data centers that can support these complex applications.
Santa Clara, California-based AMD currently dominates the lucrative market for AI semiconductors, competing with Nvidia, which has about 80% of the market share.
Since last year, Nvidia has revealed to investors its plans to shorten its release cycle to annually, and now AMD has followed suit.
“AI is clearly a top priority for us and we have been leveraging all of our in-house development capabilities to achieve it,” Su told reporters.
“This annual cycle exists because the market demands newer products and new capabilities. Every year we have the next big thing and we always have the most competitive portfolio.”
AMD also announced its next-generation chip series called MI350, which will be based on a new chip architecture and is expected to launch in 2025.
AMD said it expects the MI350 to deliver 35 times the performance in inference (the process of calculating generative AI responses) compared to its currently available MI300 series AI chips. Additionally, AMD also announced its MI400 series, which will arrive in 2026 and is based on an architecture called “Next.”
Investors who have pumped billions of dollars into Wall Street's pick-and-shovel trades are looking for longer-term updates from chip companies to gauge the sustainability of genAI's booming rise, which so far shows no signs of slowing.
AMD's shares have more than doubled since the beginning of 2023. This surge still pales in comparison to the more than sevenfold increase in Nvidia's shares over the same period.
AMD is targeting a one-year product cycle for its AI chips, and similarly, Nvidia said it plans to release a new family of AI chips every year.
AMD's Su said in April that the company expects AI chip sales to reach about $4 billion in 2024, up $500 million from its previous forecast.
AMD also said at its Computex event that its latest generation central processing units (CPUs) are likely to be launched in the second half of 2024.
While companies typically prioritize spending on AI chips in data centers, some of AMD's CPUs are paired with graphics processor units, though the ratio is skewed in favor of GPUs.
AMD has announced architectural details of a new Neural Processing Unit (NPU) dedicated to handling on-device AI tasks in its AI PCs.
Chipmakers are hoping to add AI capabilities to help spur growth in the PC market as it emerges from years of stagnation.
PC providers such as HP and Lenovo plan to release devices with AMD's AI PC chips, and AMD says its processors exceed Microsoft's Copilot+ PC requirements.
(Reporting by Arshiya Bajwa in Bengaluru, Max A. Charney and Ben Blanchard in Taipei; Editing by Will Dunham and Rashmi Aich)
