AMD's line of chips for high-performance computing and AI. The Instinct line was first released as part of AMD's Radeon GPUs in 2017 under the banner AMD Radeon Instinct. In 2020, the Radeon banner was dropped starting with the MI100, and the AI chips are officially the AMD Instinct series.
AMD Chips Have Suffixes
The AMD Instinct families (MI100, MI200, MI300, MI350 and MI400) use high bandwidth memory (HBM) and AMD's CDNA (Compute DNA) architecture with up to 185 billion transistors, 256 processing cores and 1,024 matrix multiplication cores. The MI stands for "machine intelligence" but the actual chip names have a letter suffix; for example, the MI455x is a chip in the MI400 family.
The MI455X is in production, and the AMD Helios rack system contains 72 MI455X GPUs. Planned for 2027, the faster MI500 family is expected to have greater energy efficiency. See
high bandwidth memory.
A Chiplet Leader
Although other chip companies use chiplets (multichip modules), AMD is known to be a leader in the field, which enables them to mix and match processing functions more easily than designing one gigantic chip from scratch. See
MCM and
AMD.