AMD Wins Big? at Microsoft?
Ahead of AMD's AI pep rally this week, Microsoft has announced three new Azure offerings based on AMD chips.
HDv2 virtual-machine instances are bruisers, "Featuring nearly 500 physical 6th Gen AMD EPYC CPU cores, 4 terabytes of RAM, 32 terabytes of local NVMe storage and 400 Gb Azure Boost networking." This configuration is suitable for large general-purpose workloads and AI-related tasks such as RL.
HXv2 goes even further. Targeting technical computing, especially EDA, "HXv2 VMs will feature 176 AMD 6th Gen EPYC CPU cores with a clock frequency of more than 5 GHz, 50% more addressable cache per core [than HXv1] and VM sizes with nearly 2 or 4 terabytes of RAM." The 5 GHz is presumably a boost rate. The big L3 cache is a product of HXv2's Epycs being the v-cache (stacked memory) variety. 800 Gbps InfiniBand provides connectivity.
ND MI455X v7 is a purely AI offering. Based on AMD's Helios rack and new MI455X GPU, it targets inference. Not even AMD with its improved software stack and GPU programming model can crack the training business. Helios also integrates AMD Epyc and Pensando networking processors (DPUs).
This win is more significant than other AMD announcements with Meta and Oracle. Meta announces deals with everyone, and Oracle is overextended financially. A further positive is that these deals tie to specific Microsoft offerings. Nonetheless, because the companies didn't disclose the size of the deals, it's not possible to quantify their impact on AMD.
