Mark Papermaster, chief technology officer of AMD, formally introduced the company’s Instinct MI355X accelerators for AI and HPC at ISC 2025 — revealing massive performance improvements for AI inference, but also pointing to nearly doubled power consumption of the new flagship GPU compared to its predecessor from 2023, reports ComputerBase.
AMD’s CDNA 4 enters the scene
AMD’s Instinct MI350X-series GPUs are based on the CDNA 4 architecture that introduces support for FP4 and FP6 precision formats alongside FP8 and FP16. These lower-precision formats have grown in relevance in AI workloads, particularly for inference. AMD positions its Instinct MI350X processors primarily for inference, which makes sense as scale out world size of MI350X continues to be limited to eight GPUs, which reduces their competitive capabilities compared to Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs. Still Pegatron is readying a 128-way MI350X machine.
AMD’s Instinct MI350X family of AI and HPC GPUs consists of two models: the default Instinct MI350X module with a 1000W power consumption designed for air cooling as well as the higher-performance Instinct MI355X that will consume up to 1400W and will be designed primarily for direct liquid cooling (even though AMD believes that some of its clients will be able to use air cooling with the MI355X).
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Both SKUs will come with 288GB HBM3E memory that will offer up to 8 TB/s of bandwidth, but the MI350X will offer a maximum FP4/FP6 performance of 18.45 PFLOPS, whereas the MI355X is said to push the maximum FP4/FP6 performance to 20.1 PFLOPS. On paper, both Instinct MI350X models outperform Nvidia’s B300 (Blackwell Ultra) GPU that tops at 15 FP4 PFLOPS, though it remains to be seen how AMD’s MI350X and MI355X perform in real-world applications.