Hot on the heels of its announcement of three homegrown systems-on-chips (SoCs) for data center applications, Chinese cloud giant Tencent introduced the Xinghai Wisdom Wood Series GA01, a custom graphics card based on an AMD graphics processing unit. One of the interesting details of the announcement is that Tencent gets to design its own drivers for the board, suggesting rather close collaboration with AMD.
A modern graphics processor can be used for a variety of applications, including rendering for gaming and professional applications, media encoding/decoding, and high-performance computing. Tencent runs various workloads in its cloud data centers, so it needs a rather versatile GPU that can be used for a variety of things, so it turned to AMD for a semi-custom solution, reports CSDN.net.
Normally, AMD ships its Radeon Pro with its own drivers, but with Tencent, it let the Chinese company design its own software, which is a rather unusual move since both AMD and Nvidia tend to protect peculiarities of their latest GPU architectures from competitors. Meanwhile, Tencent plans to use the card in a specially designed server with enhanced availability and reliability, so perhaps it needed to develop special drivers for the card to maximize compatibility with the machine and its software stack.
It's noteworthy that Tencent is one of the few companies that adopted Intel's Xe-LP-based SG1 Server GPU card for its remote rendering last year. These systems are used primarily to remotely render some of Tencent's games for Android to ensure smooth framerates on entry-level smartphones. Meanwhile, it looks like Tencent preferred to use an AMD GPU for other cloud data center workloads perhaps for performance and availability reasons: AMD's GPU is already here, whereas Intel's Xe HPG GPUs are months away.
