HBM4 war upgrade! AMD joins forces with Samsung to catch up with Nvidia

Kuai Technology reported on July 25 that AMD CEO Su Zifeng confirmed to the media after this week’s Advancing AI Conference that AMD is close to finalizing the HBM4 (fourth-generation high-bandwidth memory) supply agreement with Samsung. Samsung is expected to officially enter AMD’s core supply chain for next-generation accelerator cards. This also means that in addition to Nvidia, AMD has also begun to compete for early card slots for a new round of high-end graphics memory. The background of this cooperation is that AMD is fully promoting the Helios rack-level server system. This is its first complete delivery of a large-scale machine solution for data centers. The goal is directly at NVIDIA's Oberon and Kyber product lines. It no longer only sells GPUs and CPUs, but packages and sells networks, processors, accelerator cards and software. According to data released by AMD, Helios will integrate 72 Instinct MI455X GPUs, 6th generation EPYC processors and Pensando network solutions. The whole machine can provide 2.9 EF FP4 (exascale floating point operations per second) and 1.4 EF With FP8 computing power, the total capacity of HBM4 reaches 31TB, the single GPU memory bandwidth is as high as 19.6TB/s, and the scale expansion bandwidth also reaches 260TB/s and 43TB/s respectively. Su Zifeng also said that Helios has entered the full mass production stage and is expected to start shipping at the end of the third quarter of this year. She herself went to Samsung Pyeongtaek Park as early as March this year to sign a memorandum of understanding on the priority supply of memory chips. This was also regarded by the outside world as an important signal before the cooperation between the two parties was implemented. It is worth mentioning that in order to compete with Nvidia Rubin, MI455X uses HBM4 by 50% more than the previous generation. The chip transistor scale reaches 320 billion, and is manufactured using a mixture of 2nm and 3nm processes. The supply capacity of high-end video memory is likely to directly affect AMD's pace of catching up in this round. Whether Samsung can really open up a hole in the HBM4 market by borrowing AMD's order this time will depend on mass production and yield performance.