The First AI Benchmarks Pitting AMD Against Nvidia

submited by

Style Pass

2024-09-05 04:00:03

Rated horsepower for a compute engine is an interesting intellectual exercise, but it is where the rubber hits the road that really matters. We finally have the first benchmarks from MLCommons, the vendor-led testing organization that has put together the suite of MLPerf AI training and inference benchmarks, that pit the AMD Instinct “Antares” MI300X GPU against Nvidia’s “Hopper” H100 and H200 and the “Blackwell” B200 GPUs.

The results are good in that they show the MI300X is absolutely competitive with Nvidia’s H100 GPU on one set of AI inference benchmarks, and based on our own estimates of GPU and total system costs can be competitive with Nvidia’s H100 and H200 GPUs. But, the tests were only done for the Llama 2 model from Meta Platforms with 70 billion parameters. This is useful, of course, but we had hoped to see a suite of tests across different AI models as the MLPerf test not only allows but encourages.

But by the end of this year – and based on expected prices for Nvidia Blackwell B100 and B200 GPUs – it looks like Nvidia will be able to drop the price/performance boom on AMD MI300X accelerators, and perhaps the AMD MI325X GPU coming later this year, if it wants to. But for the moment, Nvidia may not want to do that. With Blackwell GPUs being redesigned and shipping a few months later than intended and Blackwell GPU demand being well ahead of supply, we expect for their prices to rise and their price/performance many not be any better than for the H100s and H200s as well as the current MI300X and future MI325X. It may all wash out to around the same street price with pricing pressure up depending on the urgency of the situation.