What is The Great Datacenter Boom?

The semiconductor industry is going to get really important.

Hey Everyone,

It’s taking me a long time to get this Newsletter of the ground and running. Basically I want to create deep dives about the semiconductor industry, but I have a lot to learn. I also have some ideas on how this all plays out.

AMD announces New Chip

AMD’s Instinct MI325X’s rollout will pit it against Nvidia’s upcoming Blackwell chips, which will start shipping in significant quantities early next year.Blackwell is sold out for a long period.

• It’s not clear if AMD’s AI chips can be one day seen by developers and cloud giants as a close substitute for Nvidia’s products.

• The Instinct MI325X, as the chip is called, will start production before the end of 2024.

AMD’s Advancing AI event

At its "Advancing AI" event in San Francisco, AMD announced:

Watch the entire event:

• Its latest server chip, code-named Turin, which AMD CEO Lisa Su said offers significant performance benefits over Intel's latest Xeon processors.

• The MI325X, an updated version of AMD's Instinct GPU, where it competes directly with Nvidia. AMD also previewed the MI350, which it expects to ship in the second half of next year.

• Other semiconductors for faster networking, as well as a version of its PC chip designed to power the first Copilot+ PCs designed specifically for business use.

The company showed off its new 5th Gen AMD EPYC central processing units (CPU) for servers, provided details on its Instinct MI325X AI accelerator, and showed off its Ryzen AI PRO 300 processors for AI PCs for enterprise customers.

The relative decline of Intel will certainly help the rise of AMD. But can they ever truly compete with Nvidia on AI chips?

I may go into more detail about AMD’s new AI chip in a separate shorter article. In the meantime I’m also considering covering breaking news in the space, to get my feet wet. While Semiconductor Things goes through some of the news in the industry twice a month, a lot of key events I want to write about may end up here.

The Great Datacenter Boom is about to accelerate A.I. Infrastructure globally