News Limited scalability of AMD's Instinct MI325X limits scale of its sales, says analyst firm

[Admin]

AMD’s Instinct MI325X failed to gain traction due to poor scalability, high power consumption, and delayed shipments, while its successor, MI355X, faces an uphill battle against Nvidia's more advanced and rack-scale-capable Blackwell GPUs.

Limited scalability of AMD's Instinct MI325X limits scale of its sales, says analyst firm : Read more

 

[JRStern]

>AMD began to ship its Instinct MI355X accelerator for AI workloads in Q2 2020

2024?

>To build AMD-based clusters with more than eight GPUs, one needs to move from scale-up
>to scale-out architecture and interconnect clusters using a networking technology, such as
>Ethernet or Infiniband, which reduces scalability.

That's not exactly a clear scale-up/scale-out difference, but I guess it's something.

 

[Albert.Thomas]

Dylan's analysis team is usually spot on.

 

[User of Computers]

"analysis"

 

[thestryker]

>AMD began to ship its Instinct MI355X accelerator for AI workloads in Q2 2020

2024?

I think the two are reversed in that paragraph because it mentions the MI325X not looking to be any better at the end as well as the year being wrong.

>To build AMD-based clusters with more than eight GPUs, one needs to move from scale-up
>to scale-out architecture and interconnect clusters using a networking technology, such as
>Ethernet or Infiniband, which reduces scalability.

That's not exactly a clear scale-up/scale-out difference, but I guess it's something.

I think what they're getting at here is that NVLink doesn't require additional interconnect hardware. Of course it's only the GB200 which has this interface so I don't think it would be a competitor in the first place. I'm not familiar enough with AI to give any insight on why this actually matters.

 

[DS426]

Yeah... I found the best thing to do is just read the original article:

https://semianalysis.com/2025/04/23...new-moat/#mi325x-and-mi355x-customer-interest

I'm not an AI guru by any means, but they lay out their many points such that any tech person can understand. Moreover, they illustrate how much things have changed at AMD in the past ~5 months -- pretty much a total *oh sh*t!* moment back in Dec'24/Jan'25 where they realize nVidia is only pulling away with AI tech and most importantly -- customers -- at an ever-increasing pace.

"Developers, developers, developers!" Did AMD really think nVidia was only winning due to faster hardware? I'm really surprised that something like this would come as enlightening. Fortunately, it's also been acknowledged in gaming, so AMD will hopefully make some nice gains in the things that us Tom's readers can really appreciate! FSR4 was already a big gap closing in technical aspects, but obviously game studios need to be convinced to adopt it and make that adoption as easy as possible (which is something that is already coming to fruition, e.g. just being able to drop new .dll files in to provide a FSR 3.1 -> 4 upgrade).

 

[dalek1234]

"performance-per-dollar" and "nvidia" in the same sentence?