American chip giant Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) released its new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) chips on the 12th, stating that its cost is lower than that of its competitor NVIDIA under the same performance. AMD is challenging NVIDIA's leading position by providing affordable alternatives.

On the same day, Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, announced the AI chip development plan at a technology event held in California. Its new products "MI350X" and "MI355X" will be provided to end users in the form of cloud servers through cloud service companies in the third quarter of this year, and the next-generation product "MI400" will be launched in 2026.

The venue of the event was the location where NVIDIA held its technical press conference three months ago. Huang Renxun, CEO of NVIDIA, once announced the plan to release high-performance new products annually here. Su Zifeng's choice to announce AMD's development plan in the same venue clearly reveals her intention to challenge NVIDIA.

Su Zifeng claimed that the performance of the new AMD products has surpassed NVIDIA's flagship product "B200". She pointed out that in large language model tests by Meta and others, AMD chips outperformed NVIDIA products in multiple metrics.

She particularly emphasized the advantage of cost-effectiveness. AMD plans to launch NVIDIA product replacement solutions at a lower price, claiming that data processing performance can be improved by up to 40% at the same cost.

AMD's progress in customer expansion for AI chips has been significant. Its products have been adopted by major players such as Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and cover seven out of the top ten leading AI companies. This reflects the strong market demand to摆脱 reliance on NVIDIA's expensive chips.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, attended the press conference that day and praised the performance of the new AMD products as "incredible". As a leader in the AI era, Altman's attendance highlights AMD's increasingly rising industry status.

However, the market gap between AMD and NVIDIA remains significant. According to data from UK research firm Omdia, NVIDIA still accounts for more than 70% of the AI chip market share by 2024. Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT to spark the generative AI craze, NVIDIA has maintained an absolute leading advantage in the AI chip field.

AMD chose to challenge at the scale-up stage of generative AI with low-cost products.

In the early stages of the development of generative AI, NVIDIA chips dominated the development of foundational models due to their excellent data learning capabilities. Entering the scale-up stage, the industry focus is shifting from "learning" to data processing centered on "reasoning". Daniel Newman, CEO of US Future Group, pointed out that in the "reasoning" era, AMD will have opportunities to enhance competitiveness.

However, for the latecomer AMD, NVIDIA's developer ecosystem presents a barrier. With rich software infrastructure such as the unified computing device architecture (CUDA), NVIDIA has firmly attracted AI system developers. A senior executive of one of its client enterprises candidly admitted that "NVIDIA's ecosystem stickiness is very strong", revealing the reality that vendors find it difficult to switch platforms.

Regarding this, AMD has put forward countermeasures.

At the press conference that day, AMD also released the new development platform "ROCm 7", which is made freely available to external enterprises in an open-source manner and supports compatibility with non-AMD chips. This strategy aims to dismantle the CUDA ecosystem built on the premise of using NVIDIA chips.

In the field of foundational AI models, Meta and China's DeepSeek, among other newcomers, are catching up by opening up foundational technologies. Similarly, in the AI chip field, challenger AMD is challenging the leading NVIDIA through technological openness, creating a competitive landscape.

Source: Reference News

Original article: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7516357470701290023/

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