AMD’s RDNA 3 hardware has proven to be immensely capable of AI acceleration such as stable diffusion, however while their hardware is certainly capable it is being let down by AMD’s own failure on their software side.
AMD recently established that their RX 7000 series graphics cards provide immense AI potential and crucially better AI performance per dollar than the likes of NVIDIA’s RTX 4080 and below, with stable diffusion thanks to DirectML and Microsoft Olive showcasing a near 10X increase in image generative performance.
But when it still comes to the AI marketing boom, AMD still falls behind in terms of actual hardware adoption and utilization due to their lackluster and argumentative software / driver division.
AMD has been acquiring all the pieces to their puzzle as needed over the last few years, most notably completing their purchase of FPGA gurus Xilinx for $50 Billion dollars back in 2022, who’ve already helped the company immensely with their graphics division thanks to Xilinix’s encoder/decoder found on RDNA 3, and also the world’s fastest AI powerhouse, AMD’s own MI300.
AMD may have the world’s fastest solutions for AI acceleration, but their software still sucks ass, but of course the company is looking to rectify its shortcomings with its latest acquisition.
AMD have bought out a company called Mipsology, a French software start-up firm focusing entirely on AI software, such as their Zebra AI accelerator. Mipsology’s Zebra AI software offers compatibility with FPGAs, including those from AMD-Xilinx. The software is promoted as a powerful solution that can rival GPU inference performance when deployed on FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays).
Obviously, AMD are looking to increase their AI inference software capabilities with this acquisition, with AMD making this statement regarding their purchase.
“Mipsology’s highly skilled software team has proven expertise in delivering AI software and solutions running on top of AMD adaptive computing silicon, and will join the AMD AI Group to help further accelerate our customer engagements and expand our AI software development capabilities. Specifically, the team will help develop our full AI software stack, expanding our open ecosystem of software tools, libraries and models to pave the way for streamlined deployment of AI models running on AMD hardware.
Founded in 2015, Mipsology develops leading AI inference, optimization solutions and tools tailored for AMD hardware. The company’s flagship Zebra AI software supports industry frameworks including TensorFlow, PyTorch, and ONNX Runtime and will help accelerate AMD solutions for AI workloads. The integration also supports the AMD Unified AI (UAI) Software Stack, which delivers a cohesive AI training and inference interface across edge, endpoint and cloud.
AI is our top strategic priority and a significant driver of incremental silicon demand over the coming decade. By welcoming the skilled Mipsology team to AMD, we will continue to strengthen our software capabilities to enable customers around the world to tap into the vast potential of pervasive AI.”
