Enjoyable truth: Aldebaran is the brightest star within the Taurus constellation. It’s 44 occasions the dimensions of the solar and 400 occasions as luminous. It’s additionally the namesake of AMD’s subsequent Intuition Accelerator.
Aldebaran, the pc half, has appeared a couple of occasions in Linux patch notes. Its two-die design was half-implied in February and confirmed final month: “on Aldebaran, solely major die fetches legitimate energy information. Present energy/vitality values as 0 on secondary die,” one word reads.
It’s the primary AMD Accelerator/GPU to leverage an MCM (multi-chip module) design, a method that’s been plastered on patents for years however has solely simply begun to materialize. Utilizing a number of chips/dies linked carefully permits for extra scalability than conventional monolithic designs, but in addition reduces the per-compute unit efficiency of a card, significantly in poorly parallelized workloads.
Nvidia is predicted to problem Aldebaran with their very own MCM designs based mostly on the Hopper structure subsequent yr. Intel, in the meantime, is on the verge of releasing the Ponte Vecchio accelerator based mostly on the Xe HPC structure and an early MCM implementation.
Like Ponte Vecchio, Aldebaran leverages MCM to increase reminiscence capability, patch notes indicate. A word from final week describes Aldebaran as having two dies, 4 UMCs per die, and eight channels linked to 2 GB of HBM per UMC. Or 128 GB, in complete.
The patch notes additionally point out assist for a “new HBM2 reminiscence kind,” presumably HBM2e. If AMD is utilizing SK Hynix’s new HBM2e reminiscence modules with 3.6 Gbps of bandwidth and a 4096-bit bus on every die, then Aldebaran might have 3.6 TB/s of reminiscence bandwidth.
For comparability, Aldebaran’s predecessor, the Intuition MI100 (previously codenamed Arcturus, one other star) has 32 GB of HBM2 and 1.2 TB/s of reminiscence bandwidth. Nvidia’s A100 accelerator might be configured with as much as 80 GB of three.2 Gbps HBM2e reminiscence for two TB/s of bandwidth.
AMD CEO Dr Lisa Su has already mentioned that the CDNA2 structure, that means Aldebaran, is slated for launch later this yr. Presumably, it can launch because the MI200 Accelerator.
“This yr, as I mentioned, we’re placing collectively our subsequent era CDNA structure. That is really a key part that enabled us to win the most important supercomputer bids within the US,” Su mentioned at a convention in Might. “… And we might be launching the subsequent era of that structure, really, later this yr. We’re very enthusiastic about it. I believe it’s progressed extraordinarily properly.”
Masthead by Timothy Dykes
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