AMD has acquired French start-up Mipsology, which specializes in AI inferencing. Specifically, AMD hopes the incorporation will allow it to deliver a better software package. However, it will also have to make a big move in terms of hardware to be a real alternative to GPU giant Nvidia.
Mipsology was already heavily linked to the U.S. chipmaker. Since its inception in 2015, it has been optimizing AI tools for AMD’s hardware. The acquisition appears to be the impetus to create an alternative to Nvidia’s extensive AI package. That aspect is quite important in making it easier for organizations to implement AI. Among other things, Nvidia offers the AI Workbench to tinker with generative AI models, which integrates seamlessly with hardware.
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AI deployment, then, is Mipsology’s specialty. It produces “plug-and-play” software to accelerate this aspect of AI computation. Inferencing is the part of AI workloads that allows models to be of predictive value. An engineer asking a chatbot when maintenance is needed on a dam, for example, will thus depend on the inferencing capabilities of the model and hardware.
AI strategy
AMD CEO Lisa Su has previously stated that AI represents a great opportunity for growth, especially in data centers. It has also had solutions for specific industries, from automotive to healthcare to telcos, for a while now. Last month, research from MosaicML showed that AMD’s hardware has 80 percent of the AI skills of Nvidia’s offerings; at least, this was specifically about AMD’s M1250 versus the Nvidia A100. So it still has a long way to go, although prices also count. For a new H100 chip from Nvidia, organizations may pay between $25,000 and $30,000, while no concrete price is yet known from AMD’s rival MI300X.
Nothing is known about the amount AMD has plunked down for Mipsology. Nor would a spokesperson even disclose how many employees the company has, CRN reported.
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