PCR Tech and IT retail, distribution and vendor news
AMD has launched its first VEGA-based device, the Radeon Instinct MI25.
In addition, the company has also launched the MI6 and MI8 as a part of the Instinct range. With those two cards the MI numbers are roughly equal to computing power. The MI6 has 5.7 TFLOPS, while the MI8 has 8.2 TFLOPS. The MI25 however doesn’t have 25 TFLOPS of FP32 computing power. Instead, its value comes FP16 calculations, meaning the card has 12.5 TFLOPs in 32-bit operations.
The clock speed of the card hasn’t been announced yet and it’s unknown as to how many cores it has. The good folks over at VideoCardz estimate that VEGA would run at under 1,000 MHz, but stress that we are awaiting official confirmation.
While one might look at these cards and be quick to compare them with the Nvidia GeForce 10-series and Titan X, these aren’t actually graphics cards, but accelerators. VideoCardz claims that Radeon Instinct is AMD’s response to the Nvidia Tesla, which is a pure computing-oriented accelerator.
According to stats from AMD, the MI25 is almost two times faster than Titan X Maxwell in DeepBench GEMM operations.
It’s unlikely that the Radeon Instinct cards will have anything of a consumer appeal, but with lots of raw power under its hood, the MI25 will likely find its place in the realm of processor-heavy server operations.
