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AMD’s Instinct MI355X accelerator will reportedly consume 1,400 watts

by admin June 12, 2025

Mark Papermaster, chief technology officer of AMD, formally introduced the company’s Instinct MI355X accelerators for AI and HPC at ISC 2025 — revealing massive performance improvements for AI inference, but also pointing to nearly doubled power consumption of the new flagship GPU compared to its predecessor from 2023, reports ComputerBase.

AMD’s CDNA 4 enters the scene

AMD’s Instinct MI350X-series GPUs are based on the CDNA 4 architecture that introduces support for FP4 and FP6 precision formats alongside FP8 and FP16. These lower-precision formats have grown in relevance in AI workloads, particularly for inference. AMD positions its Instinct MI350X processors primarily for inference, which makes sense as scale out world size of MI350X continues to be limited to eight GPUs, which reduces their competitive capabilities compared to Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs. Still Pegatron is readying a 128-way MI350X machine.

AMD’s Instinct MI350X family of AI and HPC GPUs consists of two models: the default Instinct MI350X module with a 1000W power consumption designed for air cooling as well as the higher-performance Instinct MI355X that will consume up to 1400W and will be designed primarily for direct liquid cooling (even though AMD believes that some of its clients will be able to use air cooling with the MI355X).

Faster GPUs incoming

Papermaster expressed confidence that the industry will continue to develop even more powerful CPUs and accelerators for supercomputers to achieve zettascale performance in about a decade from now. However, that performance will come at the cost of a steep increase of power consumption, which is why a supercomputer offering a ZetaFLOPS performance could consume 500 MW of power — half of what a nuclear power plant can produce.

At ISC 2025, AMD presented data showing that top supercomputers have consistently followed a trajectory where compute performance doubles roughly every 1.2 years. The graph covered performance from 1990 to the present, demonstrating peak system GFLOPs. Early growth was driven by CPU-only systems, but from around 2005, a shift to heterogeneous architectures — mixing CPUs with GPUs and accelerators — took over. Now, in what AMD calls ‘AI Acceleration Era,’ systems like El Capitan and Frontier are pushing beyond 1 ExaFLOP, continuing the exponential growth trend with increasingly AI-specialized hardware.

But performance comes at a cost of power consumption. To maintain performance growth, memory bandwidth and power scaling have become urgent challenges. AMD’s slide indicated that GPU memory bandwidth must more than double every two years to preserve the ratio of bandwidth per FLOPS. This has required increasing the number of HBM stacks per GPU, which in turn results in larger and more power-hungry GPUs and modules.

Indeed, power consumption of accelerators for supercomputers is increasing rapidly. While AMD’s Instinct MI300X introduced in mid-2023 consumed 750W peak, the Instinct MI355X, set to be formally unveiled this week, will feature a peak power consumption of 1,400W. Papermaster envisions 1,600W accelerators in 2026 – 2027 and then 2,000W processors later this decade. By contrast, AMD’s peers from Nvidia seem to be even more ambitious when it comes to power consumption as their Rubin Ultra GPUs featuring four reticle-sized compute chiplets are expected to consume as much as 3,600W.

The good news is that in addition to increased power consumption, supercomputers and accelerators have also been gaining performance efficiency rapidly. Another one of AMD’s ISC 2025 keynote slides illustrated that performance efficiency increased from about 3.2 GFLOPS/W in 2010 to approximately 52 GFLOPS/W by the time exascale systems like Frontier arrived.

Looking ahead, maintaining this pace of performance scaling will require doubling energy efficiency every 2.2 years. A projected zettascale system delivering 1,000× exaflop-class performance would need around 500 MW of power at an efficiency level of 2,140 GFLOPs/W (a 41-fold increase from today). Without such gains, future supercomputers could demand gigawatt-scale energy — comparable to an entire nuclear power plant, making them way too expensive to operate.

AMD believes that to increase the performance of supercomputers dramatically a decade from now, not only it will need to make a number of architectural breakthroughs, but the industry will have to keep pace with compute capabilities to provide adequate memory bandwidth. Still, using nuclear reactors to power supercomputers seems in the 2030s seems to be a more and more realistic possibility.

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June 12, 2025 0 comments

Esports

Consume Me gets release date

by admin June 7, 2025

AP and Jenny made waves when they claimed the Seamus McNally prize at the 2025 Independent Games Festival for their upcoming title, Consume Me.

The title is set to release on September 25th 2025.

BEING A TEENAGER SUCKS. So we made a videogame about it.Hey remember when your parents, your friends, and society at large all conspired to make you feel ugly, lazy, stupid, and unloved despite the brilliant human spirit contained within you? No? Well, allow us to refresh your memory via the timeless medium of a slice-of-life role-playing game!In Consume Me, you take on the role of Jenny, young, in love, and entering her final year of high school. Make meticulous scheduling decisions to maximize your glow-up! Solve the puzzle game of dieting! Evade distractions as you pursue scholarly success! Do chores to get money from mom at a rate much lower than minimum wage!Features: A darkly funny coming-of-age story: You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll get a little hungry, sometimes all at the same time! Sorry about that!Every meal a puzzle: Eat your lunch, but be careful not too eat too much. Also, try not to eat too little either. Throw any food you don’t want to the dog. It’s fine, she’s not on a diet!Gripping strategic decision making: A limited amount of time and an unlimited number of things to do!? This classic combination introduces the ultimate strategic question: How should you be spending your time? It’s up to you to answer this question…every day of your life!Obtain powerful equipment: Choose from a selection of garments that help you dress for success. But be warned, the armor of this world degrades after a mere single day of use…until you renew it via that ancient ritual known only as “laundry.”Over 13 possible endings: Most of them bad!

You can get a taste of its wackiness by playing the demo that’s available on Steam.

For all Day of the Devs news, stay tuned to GamingTrend!

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June 7, 2025 0 comments

Gaming Gear

AI could consume more power than Bitcoin by the end of 2025

by admin May 29, 2025

AI could soon surpass Bitcoin mining in energy consumption, according to a new analysis that concludes artificial intelligence could use close to half of all the electricity consumed by data centers globally by the end of 2025.

The estimates come from Alex de Vries-Gao, a PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Institute for Environmental Studies who has tracked cryptocurrencies’ electricity consumption and environmental impact in previous research and on his website Digiconomist. He published his latest commentary on AI’s growing electricity demand last week in the journal Joule.

AI already accounts for up to a fifth of the electricity that data centers use, according to de Vries-Gao. It’s a tricky number to pin down without big tech companies sharing data specifically on how much energy their AI models consume. De Vries-Gao had to make projections based on the supply chain for specialized computer chips used for AI. He and other researchers trying to understand AI’s energy consumption have found, however, that its appetite is growing despite efficiency gains — and at a fast enough clip to warrant more scrutiny.

“Oh boy, here we go.”

With alternative cryptocurrencies to Bitcoin — namely Ethereum — moving to less energy-intensive technologies, de Vries-Gao says he figured he was about to hang up his hat. And then “ChatGPT happened,” he tells The Verge. “I was like, Oh boy, here we go. This is another usually energy-intensive technology, especially in extremely competitive markets.”

There are a couple key parallels he sees. First is a mindset of “bigger is better.” “We see these big tech [companies] constantly boosting the size of their models, trying to have the very best model out there, but in the meanwhile, of course, also boosting the resource demands of those models,” he says.

That chase has led to a boom in new data centers for AI, particularly in the US, where there are more data centers than in any other country. Energy companies plan to build out new gas-fired power plants and nuclear reactors to meet growing electricity demand from AI. Sudden spikes in electricity demand can stress power grids and derail efforts to switch to cleaner sources of energy, problems similarly posed by new crypto mines that are essentially like data centers used to validate blockchain transactions.

The other parallel de Vries-Gao sees with his previous work on crypto mining is how hard it can be to suss out how much energy these technologies are actually using and their environmental impact. To be sure, many major tech companies developing AI tools have set climate goals and include their greenhouse gas emissions in annual sustainability reports. That’s how we know that both Google’s and Microsoft’s carbon footprints have grown in recent years as they focus on AI. But companies usually don’t break down the data to show what’s attributable to AI specifically.

To figure this out, de Vries-Gao used what he calls a “triangulation” technique. He turned to publicly available device details, analyst estimates, and companies’ earnings calls to estimate hardware production for AI and how much energy that hardware will likely use. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), which fabricates AI chips for other companies including Nvidia and AMD, saw its production capacity for packaged chips used for AI more than double between 2023 and 2024.

After calculating how much specialized AI equipment can be produced, de Vries-Gao compared that to information about how much electricity these devices consume. Last year, they likely burned through as much electricity as de Vries-Gao’s home country of the Netherlands, he found. He expects that number to grow closer to a country as large as the UK by the end of 2025, with power demand for AI reaching 23GW.

Last week, a separate report from consulting firm ICF forecasts a 25 percent rise in electricity demand in the US by the end of the decade thanks in large part to AI, traditional data centers, and Bitcoin mining.

It’s still really hard to make blanket predictions about AI’s energy consumption and the resulting environmental impact — a point laid out clearly in a deeply reported article published in MIT Technology Review last week with support from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism. A person using AI tools to promote a fundraiser might create nearly twice as much carbon pollution if their queries were answered by data centers in West Virginia than in California, as an example. Energy intensity and emissions depend on a range of factors including the types of queries made, the size of the models answering those queries, and the share of renewables and fossil fuels on the local power grid feeding the data center.

It’s a mystery that could be solved if tech companies were more transparent

It’s a mystery that could be solved if tech companies were more transparent about AI in their sustainability reporting. “The crazy amount of steps that you have to go through to be able to put any number at all on this, I think this is really absurd,” de Vries-Gao says. “It shouldn’t be this ridiculously hard. But sadly, it is.”

Looking further into the future, there’s even more uncertainty when it comes to whether energy efficiency gains will eventually flatten out electricity demand. DeepSeek made a splash earlier this year when it said that its AI model could use a fraction of the electricity that Meta’s Llama 3.1 model does — raising questions about whether tech companies really need to be such energy hogs in order to make advances in AI. The question is whether they’ll prioritize building more efficient models and abandon the “bigger is better” approach of simply throwing more data and computing power at their AI ambitions.

When Ethereum transitioned to a far more energy efficient strategy for validating transactions than Bitcoin mining, its electricity consumption suddenly dropped by 99.988 percent. Environmental advocates have pressured other blockchain networks to follow suit. But others — namely Bitcoin miners — are reluctant to abandon investments they’ve already made in existing hardware (nor give up other ideological arguments for sticking with old habits).

There’s also the risk of Jevons paradox with AI, that more efficient models will still gobble up increasing amounts of electricity because people just start to use the technology more. Either way, it’ll be hard to manage the issue without measuring it first.

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May 29, 2025 0 comments

Game Updates

Consume Me, a life-sim RPG that’ll remind you that you hated being a teenager, actually, has a demo out now

by admin May 29, 2025

“BEING A TEENAGER SUCKS. So we made a videogame about it.” These are the opening words on the Steam page for Jenny Jiao Hsia’s Consume Me, a “life-simulation RPG” about feeling “stupid, fat, lazy, and ugly in high school.” Now, I’m going to go out on a limb and say many of you that are of a post-high-school age probably don’t want to re-experience it anytime soon, but Consume Me looks like such a good time I’m going to suggest you do so anyway, especially because it just got a demo.

That self-described genre of life-simulation RPG certainly seems apt as the game sees you do things like performing Tetris-esque puzzles to make a well-balanced breakfast, putting make-up on, and walking your dog. It almost looks like an RPG by way of the mundane sections in any of the modern Persona games, said mundanity amped up and sillified to 11.

Watch on YouTube

Rather than an RPG mechanically though, there’s two things it reminds me of first and foremost. One is the WarioWare series, there’s a real oddball minigame feel to a lot of what Consume Me appears to offer, even if it’s a bit occasionally a bit slower paced than what the greedy yellow-capped… Wario is. It also reminds me of old Flash games – think Newgrounds, Miniclip, Nitrome, that sort of thing, the kinds of games you’d play during IT classes when you were meant to be putting an Excel sheet about the price of eggs together.

I’d actually seen a much, much earlier version of the game at the V&A’s Design/Play/Disrupt exhibition way back in, cripes, 2019, and was enamoured by it then. It’s great to see how far it’s come – it even won the IGF Grand-Prize earlier this year! No release date for this one just yet, but you can go ahead and wishlist it on Steam and check out that demo anyway.

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May 29, 2025 0 comments