The AMD Radeon Instinct MI60, one of the world's first 7nm graphics cards, has gone missing from the chipmaker's website. However, AMD has a perfectly good reason why the data center graphics card is no longer listed, and it comes in the form of a new alternative.
Contrary to popular speculation, the Radeon Instinct MI60 hasn't found its way into AMD's retirement home yet. The chipmaker is still actively selling the accelerator to its customers that request the specific SKU. However, AMD has changed up its strategy a bit to help push up sales.
AMD provided us with the following statement:
"We are still shipping MI60 to customers. While customers want the capacity of MI60 with 32GB HBM2 memory, they prefer the price of MI50 so we created a new product, MI50 with 32GB of HBM2. This is the product we are actively promoting with customers.”
AMD
If we look at the specifications, the Radeon Instinct MI60 has 256 Stream Processors (SPs) and 16GB more HBM2 memory than the Radeon Instinct MI50. At first sight, the difference might look substantial, but it doesn't really tell the whole story.
According to AMD's numbers, the Radeon Instinct MI60 delivers up to 10.1%, 9.7%, and 10.4% higher half-precision, single precision, and double precision performance, respectively, than the Radeon Instinct MI50. Both accelerators feature a memory bandwidth up to 1024 GBps, and memory capacity can be important with large AI models. The only reason to pick a Radeon Instinct MI60 is if you need that 32GB memory or you're tackling mission-critical work and you need every last bit of performance.
AMD never revealed the pricing for the Radeon Instinct MI60 or MI50. But judging by AMD's statement, the price difference is obviously significant, making enterprise customers more inclined to pick up the more cost-effective model. AMD did itself a favor by slapping another 16GB of memory on the Radeon Instinct MI50, as it will make the accelerator even more attractive now.
At the time of writing, AMD hasn't updated its website to reflect the 32GB option for the Radeon Instinct MI50, but the chipmaker is already promoting the new SKU among its clientele. (Update: The new accelerator is now listed here.) And remember, the Radeon Instinct MI60 is only a call away if you still prefer it over the Radeon Instinct MI50 with 32GB of HBM2 memory.
