Chipmaker AMD is taking aim at competitor Nvidia with its latest hardware release: a rack-scale system designed to power computing needs of the world’s largest AI labs.
At the company’s sold-out Advancing AI conference in San Francisco on Thursday, AMD Chair and CEO Dr. Lisa Su promoted the new AI rack system known as Helios — along with its growing list of customers, including Microsoft — as the company prepares to ship it later this year. Su also pitched the company’s newest chips that are designed to feed the compute-hungry dragon that is the AI industry.
Rack systems combine many processors into a single high-powered unit. They are built for data centers, where they train and run AI models and other compute-intensive workloads.
Su called Helios the tech industry’s “highest-performance AI rack,” adding that it was “built to train and run the most demanding frontier models in the world at massive scale.” The system will be deployed by leading AI companies at gigawatt-scale, the company said.
Nvidia has historically dominated this market with its Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell rack-scale systems. AMD is clearly looking to get in on the action. And Helios’ performance metrics appear to give it a real chance, beating out Vera Rubin by a number of metrics, The Register reported.
