To compete with Nvidia Corporation's (NASDAQ:NVDA) upcoming Blackwell system, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.'s (NASDAQ:AMD) next-generation chip is scheduled to ship in the second half of 2025.
What Happened: On Thursday, AMD disclosed plans for its next-gen MI350 chip, aimed at competing with Nvidia's new Blackwell system, with shipping anticipated in the second half of 2025.
According to AMD, the Instinct MI350 series accelerators, built on the CDNA 4 architecture, are expected to offer up to 35 times better inference performance compared to their CDNA 3-based predecessors.
The MI350 series also aims to maintain its leadership in memory capacity, boasting up to 288GB of HBM3E memory per accelerator.
AMD CEO Lisa Su's vision is for AMD to become the "end-to-end AI leader" within the next decade, reported Financial Times.
"You have to be extremely ambitious," she said, adding, "This is the beginning, not the end of the AI race."
Despite trailing Nvidia in AI chip sales, AMD has emerged as Nvidia's closest competitor in the race to offer off-the-shelf AI chips. The company projects the total addressable market for AI chips to hit $400 billion by 2027.
"When we first started, that was viewed as a really big number," Su said. "And I think people are moving towards our big number because of the tremendous demand there is for AI infrastructure."
Why It Matters: On the same day, at the "Advancing AI 2024" event, AMD launched several high-performance computing solutions, including the fifth Gen AMD EPYC server CPUs, AMD Instinct MI325X accelerators, and AMD Pensando Salina DPUs, among others.
Meanwhile, Nvidia has been making waves with its next-gen Blackwell GPU platform. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang previously confirmed that Blackwell is in full production and progressing as planned, with demand for the platform described as "insane."
This development coincides with Nvidia's customers preparing to roll out the Blackwell system in the current quarter. Microsoft Corporation announced earlier this week that it had become the first cloud provider to make the new GB200 chips available to its clients.
Our long-standing partnership with NVIDIA and deep innovation continues to lead the industry, powering the most sophisticated AI workloads.
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) October 8, 2024
Previously, it was also reported that at the Consumer Electronics Show 2025, Huang is scheduled to deliver a keynote address. The timing of the event aligns with speculation about Nvidia's next-generation GPUs expected to launch in 2025.
It's also anticipated that Nvidia may provide updates on its RTX 50 series, including desktop GPUs built on the Blackwell architecture
