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When it comes to brand names, AMD really gets the big names here. Oracle, Microsoft and now Meta.

Su is now joined on stage by Kevin Salvadori, Meta's vice president of infrastructure and engineering.

Meta's increased focus on generative AI over the past two years has been underpinned by AMD Instinct GPUs and EPYC CPUs.

Salvadori admits that Meta is a demanding customer, but AMD was ready to meet those expectations amid the company's big AI boom.

“We deployed over a million and a half CPUs,” says Salvadori. Huge numbers and serious scale.

The use of the MI300x series in production has been “instrumental” in helping Meta scale its AI infrastructure and performance inference. This was crucial in supporting the development of the large Llama language model.

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, now joins Su… just not on stage. We do a video chat where the duo talks about the pace of change and development in the AI ​​space.

“It was incredible how much innovation there was in the industry,” says Su.

AMD and Microsoft have deep, deep ties. With the AI ​​PCs, Microsoft is currently creating a completely new PC category together with AMD.

Over the past four years, Microsoft has leveraged AMD's AI innovation to power its own cloud innovation. It's a very beneficial feedback loop for both organizations that pays off.

Microsoft uses the MI300 series, which offers great benefits for key services such as its many different AI solutions and tools, as well as Azure.

“What we need to deliver is performance, per dollar, per watt,” Nadella says. A strong focus on energy efficiency and performance to deliver cost benefits for businesses.

That's the only metric that counts, says Nadella. Given the current costs associated with AI development, unlocking these improvements is critical.

We now have another partner to accompany Su on stage. This time it's Karan Batta, SVP at Oracle.

AI is of course the biggest topic of conversation here. According to Batta, Oracle is seeing “incredible levels of performance and efficiency” from AMD GPUs.

The company continues to expand MI300X series GPU capacity for customers, Batta says. There will be even more in the coming year.

Quick customer calls here with Naveen Rao, VP of AI at Databricks, now joins Su on stage to discuss the company's partnership with AMD.

“We’ve been on this journey for a while,” says Rao. “We achieved remarkable results.”

By using the MI300X, the company has achieved significant computing improvements. It's a real “powerhouse” of a GPU, says Rao.

So what's AMD's big selling point here in terms of GPU capabilities?

The Instinct MI300X series is the chip maker's flagship device and far exceeds what the competition can offer in terms of performance.

The MI300X outperforms Nvidia's H100 series in several key benchmarks, explains Su. Overall, this represents 1.3x higher performance for Llama 3 and Mistral-based workloads.

The demand for AI in data centers is increasing rapidly. If you're a regular reader of ITPro, you've come across some of the various research we've covered on the topic.

The insatiable demand from companies worldwide has led to a massive increase. According to Su, this represents a huge opportunity for AMD to capitalize on this trend with its Instinct GPU series.

Looking ahead, the numbers in question are simply staggering.

How does this benefit Google Cloud? Well, by using EPYC machines, the tech giant has reduced costs by 40% and achieved a 15% increase in performance.

There are big numbers here, and when you look at this from a financial perspective, it's very significant for the hyperscaler.

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We now have our first Google Cloud partner on the scene.

“The demand for AI computing power is insatiable.”

Here we have moved on to the data center portfolio. A really exciting area for AMD at the moment – big gains and big sales increases in the last few months.

AMD EPYC now has a record market share – and the trend is rising, says Su. At the end of the second quarter, AMD exited this area with a 34% share of sales.

“When we think about AI, it’s really about using the right computing power for the right application,” says Su.

There is truly no “one size fits all” approach to AI, and AMD is committed to helping companies unleash their creativity and adopt the technology on their terms, at their pace, and based on their individual needs.

We get a brief overview of AMD's current strategy.

“It's about leveraging the entire ecosystem – the cloud, OEMs… our goal is to create an open ecosystem,” says Su.

Su says AMD is “really committed” to driving open innovation in high-performance computing and AI infrastructure. This has been a recurring theme in the company's strategy lately – building ecosystems and collaboration.

And here we go! AMD boss Lisa Su is on stage to kick off Advancing AI.

“Let’s talk a little bit about AI,” says Su. “Actually, we’re going to talk about it a lot.”

Sets the tone here straight away.

We are now seated and we can get started. It's only a matter of time before we hear from Lisa Su in her opening remarks here at AMD Advancing AI. There is a lot of activity in the keynote room before it starts.

As I said, there is a real contrast in the crowd here at the Moscone Center today.

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But what is AMD doing in this regard? The Ryzen series is a key focus for the company in its big AI PC push, so we'll likely hear more about it during the opening keynote.

However, there have been some concerns among industry representatives about the Ryzen series.

After AMD unveiled its enterprise-grade Ryzen Pro processors, the company promised significant performance improvements, but reports in April suggested they were unlikely to meet the high performance threshold required for Microsoft to call it an “AI PC.” .

A key point of discussion here was that the AI ​​processing power of these chips does not appear to reach the 40 trillion operations per second (TOPS) standard set by Microsoft.

You can read more about this in our coverage below.

• AMD's new line of AI-enabled processors likely won't meet Microsoft's performance requirements for next-generation AI PCs

With this in mind, we could imagine AMD going full throttle with a new update to the Ryzen series.

We're expecting a big push for AI PCs from AMD today. The rise of the AI ​​PC has been a big topic of conversation over the last year, as manufacturers and chipmakers alike are driving development in this area.

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger claimed last year that the AI ​​PC would be the “star of the show” in 2024, and he wasn't wrong. This has been a big focus for Intel, one of AMD's main competitors in this space.

It's still early – and we're expecting a stream of people to converge on the Moscone Center this morning – but I have to say that downtown San Francisco is paltry compared to the carnage that Dreamforce just brought fresh air was a few weeks before.

No sea of ​​lanyards or the cacophony of car horns in chaotic traffic.

We still have some time before the opening keynote session begins, but in the meantime, why not check out our pre-conference preview to get a taste of what we have to look forward to?

• AMD laid the groundwork for a major AI push while the tech industry fawned over Nvidia

It's clear that AMD has been turning heads so far in 2024 as it prepares to battle Nvidia.

All eyes have been on the latter over the past two years since the emergence of generative AI, but AMD has recently been laying the groundwork to catch up with its big rival.

Today we'll learn more about how the company plans to move forward in the coming year, but we've seen a number of exciting acquisitions, including two in the last few months alone. This included a $4.9 billion deal to acquire ZT Systems, which represented a major statement of intent from the chipmaker.

In July, AMD also announced its $655 million acquisition of SIlo AI as part of its major AI push.