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AMD Alveo V70 AI inference accelerator card

by therealchiggs on 1/10/23, 2:04 PM with 87 comments

  • by kombine on 1/10/23, 5:46 PM

    This is inference only. AMD should invest into the full AI stack starting from training. For this they need a product comparable to NVIDIA 4090, so that entry level researchers could use their hardware. Honestly, I don't know why AMD aren't doing that already, they are best positioned to do that in the industry landscape.
  • by wyldfire on 1/10/23, 3:20 PM

    AMD XDNA – Versal AI Core / 2nd-gen AIE-ML tiles

    Are these programmable by the end-user? The "software programmability" section describes "Vitis AI" frameworks supported. But can we write our own software on these?

    Is this card FPGA-based?

    EDIT: [1] more info on the AI-engine tiles: scalar cores + "adaptable hardware (FPGA?)" + {AI+DSP}.

    [1] https://www.xilinx.com/products/technology/ai-engine.html

  • by Roark66 on 1/11/23, 9:32 AM

    If this is based on fpga tech (xilinx) I don't think it will have a cost/benefit edge over asics. Why not do their own TPU like Google did? Nowadays even embedded MCUs come with AI accelerators (last I heard was 5TOPS in a banana pi-cm4 board - that is sufficient for object detection stuff and perhaps even more).
  • by westmeal on 1/10/23, 2:59 PM

    No price is listed on their site so I'm assuming its gonna be stupid expensive, but if anyone knows would you mind posting?
  • by messe on 1/10/23, 3:39 PM

    > High-Density Video Decoder**: 96 channels of 1920x1080p

    > [...]

    > **: @10 fps, H.264/H.265

    Is 10 fps a standard measure for this kind of thing?

  • by kmeisthax on 1/10/23, 7:50 PM

    Every time I hear about an AI accelerator, I get really excited, then it turns out to be inference only.
  • by psychphysic on 1/10/23, 9:17 PM

    Did I miss something did AMD buy Xilinx? Makes sense I suppose after Intel bought Altera.

    Who owns lattice?

  • by p1esk on 1/10/23, 6:27 PM

    How much memory does it have?
  • by novaRom on 1/10/23, 3:05 PM

    What TOPS means exactly in "... TOPS*|(INT8) 404 ..." ?
  • by tgtweak on 1/10/23, 10:22 PM

    Sad to see amds ROCm efforts essentially abandoned. They were close to universal interop for cudnn and cuda on amd (and other!) Architectures.

    Hopefully Intel takes a stab at it with their ARC line out now.

  • by h2odragon on 1/10/23, 3:45 PM

    Douglas Adams said we'd have robots to watch TV for us. That seems to be the designed use case for this.

    16gb RAM / 96 video channels ... I haven't done any of that work but it feels like they expect that "96" not to be fully used in practice.

  • by hyuen on 1/10/23, 5:08 PM

    I won't even take a look at the numbers unless they show a PyTorch model running on it, the problem is the big disconnect between HW and SW, realistically, have you ever seen any off-the shelf model running on something other than NVidia?