AMD's AI Future Is Rack Scale 'Helios'
36 comments
·June 14, 2025user____name
Is Bob Page leading the effort?
kombine
If hope AMD can produce a chip that matches H100 in training workloads.
lhl
Last year I had issues using MI300X for training, and when it did work, was about 20-30% slower than H100, but I'm doing some OpenRLHF (transformers/DeepSpeed-based) DPO training atm w/ latest ROCm and PyTorch and it seems to be doing OK, roughly matching GPU-hour perf w/ an H200 for small ~12h runs.
Note: previous testing I did was on a single (8x) MI300X node, currently I'm doing testing on just a single MI300X GPU, so not quite apples-to-apples, multi-GPU/multi-node training is still a question mark, just a single data point.
fooker
It gets even more jarring that H100 is about three years old now.
moralestapia
You mean a slower chip?
Their MI300s already beat them, 400s coming soon.
zombiwoof
AMD future should be figuring out how to reproduce the performance numbers they “claim” they are getting
aetherspawn
I hear [“Atropos log, abandoning Helios”](https://returnal.fandom.com/wiki/Helios) and have an emotional reaction every time this comes up in the news.
halJordan
Honestly that was a hard read. I hope that guy gets an mi355 just for writing this.
AMD deserves exactly zero of the credulity this writer heaps onto them. They just spent four months not supporting their rdna4 lineup in rocm after launch. AMD is functionally capable of day120 support. None of the benchmarks disambiguated where the performance is coming from. 100% they are lying on some level, representing their fp4 performance against fp 8/16.
jchw
I still find their delay with properly investing in ROCm on client to be rather shocking, but in fairness they did finally announce that they would be supporting client cards on day 1[1]. Of course, AMD has to keep the promise for it to matter, but they really do seem to, for whatever reason, finally realized just how important it is that ROCm is well-supported across their entire stack (among many other investments they've announced recently.)
It's baffling that AMD is the same company that makes both Ryzen and Radeon, but the year-to-date for Radeon has been very good, aside from the official ROCm support for RDNA4 taking far too long. I wouldn't get overly optimistic; even if AMD finally committed hard to ROCm and Radeon it doesn't mean they'll be able to compete effectively against NVIDIA, but the consumer showing wasn't so bad so far with the 9070 XT and FSR4, so I'm cautiously optimistic they've decided to try to miss some opportunities to miss opportunities. Let's see how long these promises last... Maybe longer than a Threadripper socket, if we're lucky :)
roenxi
Is this day 1 support a claim about the future or something they've demonstrated? Because if it involves the future it is safer to just assume AMD will muck it up somehow when it comes to their AI chips. It isn't like their failure in the space is a weird one-off - it has been confusingly systemic for years. It'd be nice if they pull it off, but it could easily be day 1 support for a chip that turns out to crash the computer.
I dunno; I suppose they can execute on server parts. But regardless, a good plan here is to let someone else go first and report back.
pclmulqdq
AMD doesn't care about you being able to do computing on their consumer GPUs. The datacenter GPUs have a pretty good software stack and great support.
fc417fc802
I'm inclined to believe it but that difference is exactly how nvidia got so far ahead of them in this space. They've consistently gone out of their way to put their GPGPU hardware and software in the hands of the average student and professional and the results speak for themselves.
zombiwoof
Just look at the disaster of rocm or you need to spend 300k on software engineers to get anything so work
stingraycharles
Yes but then they fail to understand a lot of “long tail” home projects, opensource stuff etc is done on consumer GPUs at home, which is tremendously important for ecosystem support.
wmf
What if they understand that and they don't care? Getting one hyperscaler as a customer is worth more than the entire long tail.
cma
Nvidia started removing nvlink with the 4000 series, they aren't heavily focused on it either anymore and want to sell the workstation cards for uses like training models at home.
viewtransform
AMD is offering AMD Developer Cloud (https://www.amd.com/en/blogs/2025/introducing-the-amd-develo...)
"25 complimentary GPU hours (approximately $50 US of credit for a single MI300X GPU instance), available for 10 days. If you need additional hours, we've made it easy to request additional credits."
archerx
If they care about their future they should. I am a die hard AMD supporter and even I am getting over their mediocrity and what seems to be constant self sabotage in the GPU department.
zombiwoof
It’s the AMD management . They just are recycling 20 year VP lifers at AMD to take over key projects
booder1
I have had trained on both large AMD and Nvidia clusters and your right AMD support is good. I never had to talk to Nvidia support. That was better.
They should care about the availability of their hardware so large customers don't have to find and fix their bugs. Let consumers do that...
echelon
> AMD doesn't care about you being able to do computing on their consumer GPUs
Makes it a little hard to develop for without consumer GPU support...
fooker
It’s the same software stack.
caycep
this is ROCm?
fooblaster
Yes, the mi300x/mi250 are best supported as they directly compete with data center gpus from Nvidia which actually make money. Desktop is a rounding error by comparison.
zombiwoof
Exactly.
AMD is a marketing company now
null
Jensen knows what he is doing with the CUDA stack and workstations. AMD needs to beat that more than thinking about bigger hardware. Most people are not going to risk years learning an arcane stack for an architecture that is used by less than 10% of the GPGPU market.