The News: AMD and Hugging Face announced on June 13 at the AMD Data Center and AI Technology Premiere they are collaborating “to deliver state-of-the-art transformer performance on AMD CPUs and GPUs.” In a blog post explaining the initiative, Julien Simon, Chief Evangelist at Hugging Face, noted that the selection of deep learning hardware has been limited for years and that prices and supply are growing concerns. The new AMD-Hugging Face partnership “will do more than match the competition and help alleviate market dynamics, it should also set new cost-performance standards.”
For GPUs, the AMD-Hugging Face partnership will focus on AMD Instinct MI200 Series and new AMD Instinct MI300 Series Accelerators. For CPUs, the focus will be on optimizing AI inference for laptop processors AMD Ryzen and for AMD EPYC Server Processors. Simon noted that CPUs are a viable option for AI transformer model inference.
The plan is to support transformer architectures for a comprehensive range of AI models – natural language processing (NLP), computer vision and speech (ex: BERT, DistilBERT, ROBERTA, Vision Transformer, CLIP, Vav2Vec2) and generative AI models (GPT2, GPE-NeoX, Google’s T5, OPT, Meta’s LLaMa) as well as Hugging Face’s BLOOM and StarCoder.
The AMD-Hugging Face partnership was one of several strategic AI initiatives AMD shared during the premiere. Read the full press release here.
Read the full AMD-Hugging Face partnership blog post here.
AMD and Hugging Face Team Up to Democratize AI Compute – Shrewd Alliance Could Lead to AI Compute Competition, Lower AI Costs
Analyst Take: The AMD-Hugging Face partnership is a shrewd strategic move by both organizations. Here’s why:
Hugging Face’s AI Innovation Credibility
The AMD–Hugging Face partnership gives AMD instant AI credibility. In the extremely nascent generative AI market, Hugging Face has quickly become one of the most powerful influencers/players in the market. Their focus on open-source code, AI ethics, and easy-to-deploy tools has attracted more than 5,000 organizations, including the Allen Institute for AI, Meta, Google, AWS, and Microsoft. Their BLOOM LLM is one of the more thoughtful, powerful and imaginative approaches to LLM capabilities.
AMD Gains a Key Partner to Roadmap AI
The AMD-Hugging Face partnership will enable AMD to envision long-term strategies for AI compute. Semiconductor companies have some of the more difficult strategic roadmaps to navigate in technology ecosystems, because they have to think in longer development cycles and because they need to think strategically very far downstream from their products. These issues are particularly relevant when it comes to AI use cases.
Push for AI Compute Efficiency Leads to Legitimate AI Compute Competition
Hugging Face and the market as a whole will benefit from AMD’s potential to gain AI compute market share. The equation for future AI compute is unclear. Many industry watchers predict AI compute will grow exponentially because of the compute loads currently required by LLMs, but already the market is seeing the emergence of more narrowly-focused LLMs, which will take less AI compute power. The Futurum Group believes market dynamics for cost/price will drive AI innovators to build more efficient AI compute options that could open the doors for increased use of CPUs instead of GPUs. Either way, look for AMD to aggressively innovate in the AI compute space with the help of their partner Hugging Face.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Image Source: AMD
Author Information
Mark comes to The Futurum Group from Omdia’s Artificial Intelligence practice, where his focus was on natural language and AI use cases.
Previously, Mark worked as a consultant and analyst providing custom and syndicated qualitative market analysis with an emphasis on mobile technology and identifying trends and opportunities for companies like Syniverse and ABI Research. He has been cited by international media outlets including CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, and CNET. Based in Tampa, Florida, Mark is a veteran market research analyst with 25 years of experience interpreting technology business and holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Florida.
