AMD and NVIDIA have also been rivals for many years, but the two sides are not only fighting each other, but also occasionally cooperating.NVIDIA recently launched the DGX A100 supercomputing at a price of 1.41 million yuan (US $200000)In addition to its own 7Nm amp GPU, it also uses a dual channel epyc 64 core processor.

DGX is a small GPU supercomputing platform built by NVIDIA. This time, the third generation product is launched. Eight Tesla A100 GPUs with ampere architecture are equipped inside the DGX A100. Each of them integrates 40Gb hbm2 high bandwidth memory, with a total capacity of 320GB.

Each GPU supports up to 12 channels of nvlink interconnection bus. The gpu-gpu bandwidth is up to 600gb / s, which can ensure that eight GPUs are completely interconnected with each other. At the same time, there are six NVIDIA nvswitch chips, with bidirectional bandwidth up to 4.8tb/s.

In terms of CPU, DGX series used to choose Intel Xeon processor, butThe DGX A100 uses AMD EPYC 7742,64 core 128 threads, with a reference frequency of 2.25 slightly lower GHz, but a maximum acceleration of 3.4 and thermal design power consumption at 225 W.

In terms of CPU selection, it's not surprising that NVIDIA chose Intel before. After all, there are not many competitions between the two companies, and AMD is the direct competitor of NVIDIA. Now DGX A100 still chooses AMD's epyc processor, which can only be said that the temptation of cooperation between the two parties is greater than the competition.

On the one hand, the AMD EPYC processor is the only support PCIe 4.0 in the x86 server CPU, the performance improvement is huge, on the other hand, of course, the processor cost-effective, less than $7000 can buy 64 cores, dual direct 128 cores 256 threads, much more cost-effective.

For the cooperation between the two sides, Su Zifeng, CEO of AMD, also made comments recently. First, she congratulated DGX A100 on its official release. Second, she was proud of NVIDIA's choice of AMD's CPU products. She said that epyc not only brought PCIe 4.0 support, but also was the only one able to provide computing power for 8-way amp GPU.