Infrastructure Briefing — June 3, 2024
AMD revealed the Instinct MI325X accelerator and MI350/MI400 roadmap at Computex 2024, providing new options for AI clusters starting late 2024.
Executive briefing: AMD’s MI325X, announced June 3, 2024, brings 288GB of HBM3E and 6 TB/s bandwidth, with general availability promised in Q4. Zeph Tech urges infrastructure teams to evaluate how the MI300 ecosystem evolves, particularly for inference and fine-tuning workloads constrained by NVIDIA supply.
Key industry signals
- Roadmap visibility. AMD disclosed MI350 (2025) and MI400 (2026) using next-gen CDNA architectures, helping enterprises plan multi-year diversification.
- Open software stack. ROCm 6.1 arrives with expanded PyTorch and Triton support, reducing porting friction.
- OEM support. Dell, HPE, Lenovo, and Supermicro confirmed MI300-series servers, signalling channel availability.
Control alignment
- ITIL Change Enablement. Document MI325X introduction as a major change with rehearsal plans for ROCm upgrades.
- NERC CIP-013. For regulated utilities adopting MI300-series gear, extend supply chain risk assessments to AMD and partner fabs.
Detection and response priorities
- Monitor ROCm release notes and CVEs as the ecosystem expands beyond hyperscalers.
- Instrument performance baselines for MI325X nodes to detect thermal or driver anomalies during pilot phases.
Enablement moves
- Coordinate with ISVs to confirm licensing and support for MI300-class accelerators.
- Develop procurement timelines that hedge supply risk across AMD and NVIDIA allocations.
Zeph Tech analysis
- HBM capacity becomes a planning lever. AMD briefed that MI325X exposes 288 GB of HBM3e at 6 TB/s, allowing 70 billion parameter models such as Llama 3 70B to run without tensor-parallel sharding that drives up inference cost.
- ROCm 6.1 narrows tooling gaps. FlashAttention-3 kernels, quantisation recipes for Mixtral and Phi-3, and ExecuTorch bridges help platform teams reuse PyTorch graphs instead of writing bespoke HIP kernels.
- Channel supply will be gated. Dell, HPE, Lenovo, and Supermicro communicated Q4 2024 volume independent MI325X nodes with allocation tiers; data center leads should reserve power and liquid cooling capacity during Q3 to avoid deferrals.
Zeph Tech advises on ROCm readiness assessments, benchmarking, and supply diversification for AMD Instinct deployments.