[TP] AMD Hints At HPC Push (Seamicro Rapid Expansion?)

[artivix]

AMD used to have a stronger HPC presence, but the advantages that its Opteron processors had over their Intel Xeon rivals evaporated, And because of Opteron chip delays and an architectural shift for interconnects, Cray shifted from Opteron to Xeon processors with its latest XC30 systems.

AMD has had a few key HPC wins with earlier generations of Cray machines, such as at Oak Ridge National Lab where the GPU-boosted Titan supercomputer is outfitted with the “Interlagos” Opteron processors, giving it 27 petaflops peak and the number two spot on the Top 500 list of the fastest systems. It also had a top spot on the Green 500 list with a cluster configured with its FirePro GPU cards acting as coprocessors. ...

Outside of the traditional areas in HPC, most notably in oil and gas, AMD is seeing opportunities for their Accelerated Processing Units, or APU, hybrid CPU-GPU chips, which are used in client devices but which are also available in server variants aimed at low-end server cards. AMD is focusing these APUs in many of the same places that Nvidia is pushing with its Tesla GPU coprocessors—in deep learning and neural networks. (Deep learning is the main theme of Nvidia’s annual GPU Technology Conference coming up next week.)

Freund says AMD is already working closely with unnamed social networks that are testing its high-end GPUs for hosting deep neural network applications.

Since CPUs and GPUs are quickly evolving for use in numerous applications besides basic PC computing and gaming, it is interesting to read how AMD is positioning itself into the HPC market. The last several paragraphs make clear that AMD is also making inroads with their open standards stance compared to how Nvidia positioned itself with their proprietary CUDA.

Another thing that was interesting is that this article was around March 10 and just checking AMD job openings from that time, there was a very big jump in ads for their Seamicro division. It has gone from usually around 10-20 openings to over 140 new job openings at Seamicro!

http://www.simplyhired.com/search?q=seamicro


http://www.theplatform.net/2015/03/10/amd-hints-at-future-hpc-push/

 

[jhu]

Do their GPUs have better Blender support yet? no?

 

[mrmt]

Another thing that was interesting is that this article was around March 10 and just checking AMD job openings from that time, there was a very big jump in ads for their Seamicro division. It has gone from usually around 10-20 openings to over 140 new job openings at Seamicro!

It may not be an indicative of an expansion, it could be a clean up. AMD wrote down a huge chunk of the acquisition value last quarter, that should result in a change of strategy, with the corresponding change of personnel.

 

[monstercameron]

Do their GPUs have better Blender support yet? no?

i thought they were redesigning the blender kernel to better be inline with ocl spec? I read that the program was a port from cuda and that it was just too big to run porperly on amds ocl implementation.