AMD's AI chips could match Nvidia's offerings, says software firm MosaicML

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Nvidia Corp, with a future path to matching their performance, according a Friday report by an AI software firm. Nvidia dominates the market for the powerful chips that are used to create ChatGPT and other AI services that have swept through the technology industry in recent months. The popularity of those services has pushed Nvidia's value past $1 trillion and led to a shortage of its chips that the Nvidia says it is working to resolve.

But in the meantime, tech companies are looking for alternatives, with hopes that AMD will be a strong challenger. That prompted MosaicML, an AI startup acquired for $1.3 billion earlier this week, to conduct a test comparing between AI chips from AMD and Nvidia. MosaicML evaluated the AMD MI250 and the Nvidia A100, both of which are one generation behind each company's flagship chips but are still in high demand.

MosaicML found AMD's chip could get 80% of the performance of Nvidia's chip, thanks largely to a new version of AMD software released late last year and a new version of open-source software backed by Meta Platforms called PyTorch that was released in March. Hanlin Tang, chief technology officer of MosaicML, said that the company believes that further software updates from AMD that are in the works should help its MI250 chip match the performance of Nvidia's A100. «For most (machine learning) chip companies out there, the software is the Achilles heel of it,» Tang said, adding that AMD had not paid MosaicML to conduct its research.