Posted on Monday, February 10 2020 @ 10:56 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
A BIOS for the AMD Radeon Instinct MI100 datacenter card showed up. This model uses "Arcturus", a new GPU believed to be made for non-gaming tasks. It's basically an answer to NVIDIA's Tesla. The Radeon MI100 is equipped with 32GB HBM2 clocked at 1000MHz and is presumed to have a 200W TDP. It's not exactly known what Arcturus is, but it seems to be a new accelerator architecture specifically for datacenters, based on the Vega design:
Arcturus is not "big Navi," rather it seems to be much closer to Vega than to Navi, which makes perfect sense given its target market. AMD's Linux sources mention "It's because Arcturus has not 3D engine", which could hint at what AMD did with this chip: take Vega and remove all 3D raster graphics ability, which shaves a few billion transistors off the silicon, freeing up space for more CUs.
Full details
at TechPowerUp.
