AMD says ZT acquisition will further the combination of AMD CPU, GPU and networking silicon and Rapt will bolster AI inference and training applications
There’s been a fair amount of activity on the AMD front that was drowned out by the hoopla from the recent Nvidia GTC news barrage. With that as a backdrop, here’s a look at some recent AMD news:
AMD announced plans to acquire ZT for $4.9 billion in August of last year. ZT designs, manufactures, integrates, and deploys servers for hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, although the manufacturing business is expected to be sold off this year, with AMD saying that it is in talks with “multiple potential strategic partners” to sell the business.
The new subsidiary will become a part of the AMD Data Center Solutions business unit led by AMD executive vice president Forrest Norrod. ZT Systems founder and CEO Frank Zhang will become the senior vice president of ZT Manufacturing, reporting to Norrod.
AMD said the acquisition will enable a new class of end-to-end AI offerings based on the combination of AMD CPU, GPU and networking silicon, open-source AMD ROCm software and rack-scale systems capabilities. In short, what Nvidia offers with its DGX systems, AMD now has an alternative.
Rapt AI Partnership
In its latest partnership, AMD has teamed up with Rapt AI, developer of a workload automation and optimization platform for GPUs. The partnership is designed to improve AI inference and training workload management and performance on AMD Instinct GPUs.
By combining AMD Instinct GPUs with Rapt AI’s intelligent workload automation, customers can maximize GPU utilization, reduce TCO, and optimize resource allocation for AI inference and training. It also streamlines GPU management across on-premise and multi-cloud environments for seamless AI deployment and increased inference performance.
AMD says Rapt’s platform works out-of-the-box with Instinct GPUs, helping ensure immediate performance benefits. Ongoing collaboration between Rapt and AMD will drive further optimizations in exciting areas such as GPU scheduling and memory utilization.
5th Gen Epyc on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Oracle has announced the availability of fifth generation AMD Epyc processors (codenamed “Turin”) on its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) cloud services.
The new OCI Compute E6 shapes are for general-purpose and compute-intensive workloads. These OCI shapes add to the selection of more than a thousand compute instances powered by AMD Epyc processors across all major cloud service providers.
OCI Compute E6 Standard bare metal instances and virtual machines are available today in multiple regions, including US East (Ashburn), US West (Phoenix), US Midwest (Chicago), Germany Central (Frankfurt), and UK South (London), with a rollout planned for additional regions in the coming months.
Source: https://www.networkworld.com/
