AMD Instinct MI300: The first Zen 4 plus CDNA 3 APU also uses HBM(3)

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AMD has been talking about an absolute high-end APU for years, now it could come: in the form of a modification of the Instinct MI300. The new edition of the recently introduced variant Instinct MI200, which is explicitly intended as an accelerator for supercomputers, could therefore open up a completely new product class years…

In 2015, the concept of a “mega-APU” first appeared, back then it was an exascale vision with 32 cores, GPU and stacked DRAM. Basically, the rumors were right back then, because development continued in this direction in the coming years, although they have now been supplemented and expanded with the appropriate new possibilities: First and foremost the chiplet technology at AMD and probably also in the future the stacking. Of particular note is a 2017 paper by AMD Research entitled “Design and Analysis of an APU for Exascale Computing”.

AMD's Exascale APU in 2015 (Image: AMD)
AMD's Exascale APU in 2017 (Image: AMD)

… and now perhaps completed?

And that's exactly where the latest rumors are headed develop the Instinct MI300 as the final product. It is no longer just a pure graphics accelerator based on CDNA3, as the offshoot of RDNA3 developed in parallel for the professional sector is called, with a fast HBM on the side, but it will also bring its own CPU cores and thus become a kind of APU .

AMD Instinct MI300 also as an APU version (Image: Adored)

There have recently been several rumors along these lines. They had brought several variants of the Instinct MI300 into play, so the version as an APU would probably stand by the side of pure classic GPU solutions and complement the portfolio.

The tapeouts should be completed in these months (a slight delay is being discussed as is currently the case everywhere), and the finished silicon should then be working in the laboratory before the end of this year. It usually takes a good year before the products become available, provided all the tests go according to plan.

But such a special solution is unlikely to be available for everyone, an additional base is supposed to provide housing. “SH5” appeared here last autumn, which was assigned to the Zen 4 but also to MI300, but it was not yet possible to classify this. Now, however, a picture could slowly emerge from this. As usual, however, such rumors should be treated with caution.