UPDATE 6/12: As it turns out, AMD's Helios has 72 GPUs, not 128 GPUs. Updating the story to reflect changes.
AMD gave a preview of its first in-house designed rack-scale solution, Helios, at its Advancing AI event on Thursday. The system is set to be based on the company's next-generation EPYC 'Venice' processors, will use its Instinct MI400-series accelerator, and will rely on network connections featuring the upcoming Pensando network cards. Overall, the company says that the flagship MI400X is 10 times more powerful than the MI300X, which is a remarkable progress given that the MI400X will be released about three years after the MI300X.
When it comes to rack-scale solutions for AI, AMD clearly trails behind Nvidia. This is going to change a bit this year as cloud service providers (such as Oracle OCI), OEMs, and ODMs will build and deploy rack-scale solutions based on the Instinct MI350X-series GPUs, but those systems will not be designed by AMD, and they will have to interconnect each 8-way system using Ethernet, not low-latency high-bandwidth interconnects like NVLink.
