From HPCwire, August 26:
An AMD call to discuss its $4.9 billion acquisition of ZT Systems provided an inside look into how Lisa Su is building her AI empire. She laid down an AMD AI landscape that is polar opposite to Nvidia’s proprietary approach.
In her view, customers have a choice: choose a dystopian Nvidia world in which the company owns the assets, or select AMD’s world, where you can select your partners, hardware, technologies, and AI tools.
The ZT Systems acquisition was in that spirit: to provide engineers with the ability to build systems optimized for AI processing and power consumption.
Su thinks its AI offerings will be quite differentiating.
“We actually can use our systems capability to allow customers to use whatever they believe is the best capability for their workload and their data center environment,” Su said.
To be sure, the full-stack vendor may not seem new. AMD has been building up its systems vendor capability by acquiring all critical parts of computing: software, hardware, and networking.
Copying Nvidia’s Strategy
Earlier this year, AMD announced that it would release a new GPU each year, similar to Nvidia. ZT Systems gives AMD 1,000 engineers to build systems, much like Nvidia’s engineers building DGX systems.“ZT ships hundreds of thousands of servers and tens of thousands of AI racks per year to the largest hyperscale cloud companies with industry-leading quality,” Su said.
That sounds like Nvidia’s current strategy — all major cloud providers gave Nvidia space to install DGX systems. Nvidia has built its own parallel cloud service that links up its GPU systems across all cloud providers.
“We’re trying to give our customers choice while giving them best-in-class design capability with our technology,” Su said.
While AMD is getting accolades, a lot of things need to come together for it to be the next Nvidia.
It took decades for Nvidia to reach where it is today. The transition included:
- Building a software framework with CUDA in 2007.
- Envisioning AI capabilities.
- Delivering the first hardware that allowed OpenAI to test its AI models.
AMD is no Nvidia, and a lot of things need to line up for the company to be the next Nvidia
It’s a good time to look at issues the company needs to resolve....
....MUCH MORE
