At SC24, the Microsoft Azure HPC team had its newest instance hardware for the HBv5 on display. The newly announced instance type uses the chip former

This is the Microsoft Azure HBv5 and AMD MI300C

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2024-11-20 16:00:08

At SC24, the Microsoft Azure HPC team had its newest instance hardware for the HBv5 on display. The newly announced instance type uses the chip formerly known as the AMD MI300C, which combines Zen 4 cores with HBM memory making something much larger than the Intel Xeon MAX 9480.

To understand what is going on here with the MI300C, it is worth looking at the AMD Instinct MI300A. With the MI300A, the XCD or GPU accelerator die was replaced by a 24 core Zen 4 CCD. With the MI300C, imagine if instead all four sites had 24 core CCDs. Many stories came out yesterday calling this an 88 core part. It is actually a 96 core part with eight cores being reserved for overhead in Azure. HBv5 is a virtualized instance, so it is common that some cores are reserved. Aside from having 88 of the 96 cores in the top-end VM, SMT is also turned off by Azure to help its clients achieve maximum HPC performance.

In terms of the actual box, we can see the fans and power bus bar tap at the rear of the chassis, but then some massive heatsinks in the middle.

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