SAN FRANCISCO - AMD’s MI500 series GPUs will cater to both copper and optical connectivity, the chip giant confirmed.
CEO Dr. Lisa Su revealed the update during the close of AMD’s Advancing AI keynote, with the company set to make the leap in 2027.
Su said the Instinct MI500 would bend the inference curve more, culminating in a throughput increase of more than 2,000 times in just four years, adding: “MI500 will deliver the largest generational leap in the history of Instinct.”
Having debuted an entirely copper rack-scale architecture in its Helios system, information was light on the ground as to the exact optical technologies AMD is set to use in its future roadmap.
In a technical talk the day prior, Krishna Doddapaneni, corporate VP for AMD Pensando, said in response to an SDxCentral question on optics that it was a “future thing,” but AMD has been talking about it behind the scenes, though declined to share more.
AMD is a member of the Optical Compute Interconnect Multi-Source Agreement consortium, or OCI-MSA, which is working on interoperable open standards for optical interconnects for scale-up networks, alongside Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI.
Its big rival, Nvidia, is also an OCI-MSA member and is set to drop its version of co-packaged optic switches later this year, with early versions showcased by neoclouds like Lambda.
MI500's 2027 launch date would put it a year ahead of Nvidia's planned optical and copper co-offering, with Feynman not featuring the tech for scale-up and scale-out until 2028.