AMD Accelerates Launch of Powerful Instinct MI350 AI GPU to Challenge Nvidia's Dominance

AMD fast-tracks its most powerful AI GPU ever as it seeks to steal market sharefrom Nvidia's Blackwell B100 and B200

Despite rapid growth and innovation, AMD's production challenges persist AMD is set to bring forward the launch schedule of its Instinct MI355X GPU as it looks to bring the battle to Nvidia in the increasingly lucrative hardware market. Though the product was originally set for a late 2025 debut, the MI355X is now expected to arrive by mid-2025, Nextplatform reports. It's a move that reveals the scale of AMD's urgency to challenge the established market dominance; Nvidia's Blackwell series has long been synonymous with top-tier performance. We already know the Instinct MI355X GPU is built on AMD's new CDNA 4 architecture and will come with 288GB of HBM3E memory, as well as support 8TB/sec of bandwidth. These enhancements, along with support for FP6 and FP4 low-precision computing, are designed to meet the demanding needs of AI processing. By comparison, Nvidia's Blackwell B200 offers 192GB of HBM3E memory with similar bandwidth, positioning the MI355X as a serious contender in high-performance AI acceleration. AMD's push into high-performance GPUs is driven by the explosive growth of its data center business segment. In 2024, this segment, which includes Epyc CPUs, Instinct GPUs, Pensando DPUs, and Xilinx FPGA accelerators, accounted for nearly half of its $25.79 billion in revenue. The company's Instinct GPU sales alone surpassed $5 billion, reflecting strong demand for AI and high-performance computing solutions. Nevertheless, AMD faces production challenges due to limited access to high-bandwidth memory (HBM) and advanced packaging technologies like CoWoS, which have constrained its ability to fully meet market demand. Although Nvidia continues to lead the global AI accelerator market with a commanding share exceeding 90% and a valuation that places it among the world's most valuable companies, AMD's decision to fast-track the MI355X launch shows its determination to mount a serious challenge and claim some market share for itself. In case you missed it, AMD unveiled initial details about its next-generation accelerator in June 2024, hinting at what was to come. Shortly thereafter, the company released additional information on its upcoming Instinct MI355X GPU.

AMD Details Plans For Instinct AI GPU Lineup; MI350 To Now Release By Mid-2025, MI400 Lineup Slated For 2026

AMD outlined its AI roadmap at the recent earnings call, saying that the Instinct AI GPU lineup is set to generate "tens of billions" of dollars in the upcoming years. Team Red's journey in the AI business hasn't been much of an impressive one, since the firm not only failed to capitalize on the hype early on, but with its Instinct AI accelerator lineup, AMD didn't see sales traction similar to its competitor NVIDIA. However, the future surely does look bright for the company, and in the recent earnings calls, the firm has given us an update on its Instinct lineup, revealing development on the Instinct MI325X and MI350 AI accelerators, along with giving a glimpse of the future MI400 lineup. Starting with the MI300 series, AMD's MI300X has been a massive hit in terms of adoption in the markets since Team Red claims that the accelerator has seen deployment by the likes of Microsoft, IBM, and Meta, along with large-scale AI and HPC clusters like the El Capitan system. Interestingly, AMD has decided to start volume production of its next-gen MI350 AI accelerator by the middle of the year, which was initially scheduled for H2 2025. This move was made in light of Intel's cancellation of Falcon Shores and AMD's optimism towards the AI market. The customer feedback on MI350 series has been strong, driving deeper and broader customer engagements with both existing and net new hyperscale customers in preparation for at-scale MI350 deployments. Based on early silicon progress and the strong customer interest in the MI350 series, we now plan to sample lead customers this quarter and are on track to accelerate production shipments to mid-year - AMD This is indeed interesting, given that AMD's MI350 will be based on a 3nm process node, offer up to 288 GB HBM3E memory, and be a direct competitor to NVIDIA's Blackwell lineup. To top it all off, the MI350 is said to feature AMD's next-gen "CDNA 4" architecture, which will show us how far AMD has come along in terms of generational gaps between its AI architectures, likely giving us a better rundown on the future of AMD's plans. Another interesting mention is about AMD's next-gen MI400 AI lineup, which is said to employ the "CDNA-next" architecture. Team Red has verified that the lineup is slated to launch by 2026 and is said to offer competitive performance, likely utilizing HBM4 and much more. Overall, AMD is bullish on its AI business, as the firm claims that it expects revenue to increase massively over the upcoming years. We believe this places AMD on a steep long-term growth trajectory, led by the rapid scaling of our data center AI franchise from more than $5 billion in revenue in 2024 to tens of billions of dollars of annual revenue over the coming years. - AMD It will be interesting to see how the future pans out for AMD, since the company looks to be determined to establish a stronghold over the markets.

AMD teases Instinct AI GPU roadmap: MI350 expected in mid-2025, next-gen MI400 arrives in 2026

AMD has provided an outline of its Instinct AI accelerator launch plans, with its Instinct MI350 arriving in mid-2025, while its next-gen Instinct MI400 arrives in 2026. During its recent earnings call, the company explained it expects to generate "tens of billions" of dollars in new AI revenue through its data center business, with plans for its Instinct AI accelerator to scale up massively. AMD discussed development of its Instinct MI325X and MI350 AI accelerators, also teasing its next-gen Instinct MI400 accelerator. AMD is pushing volume production of its next-gen MI350 AI accelerator for the middle of the year, after the world expecting it to be scheduled for 2H 2025. This is because Intel just canceled its Falcon Shores AI chip, and with AMD having more optimism for the AI market as a whole. The new AMD Instinct MI350 AI accelerator will have its chip fabbed on TSM's new 3nm process node, rocking up to 288GB of HBM3E memory. The new Instinct MI350 will use AMD's next-gen CDNA 4 architecture, before the company makes the big move to its new UDNA architecture with MI400. AMD explains: "The customer feedback on MI350 series has been strong, driving deeper and broader customer engagements with both existing and net new hyperscale customers in preparation for at-scale MI350 deployments. Based on early silicon progress and the strong customer interest in the MI350 series, we now plan to sample lead customers this quarter and are on track to accelerate production shipments to mid-year".