AMD and Intel may be willing to put their rivalry aside when it comes to AI and datacentres in order to counteract Nvidia’s fast-growing server ecosystem. If you can’t beat it alone, assemble an Avengers team.
In an interview with The Register, AMD EVP of datacentre Forrest Norrod said: “We are absolutely committed to open [ecosystems], even open to working with customers or others that are directly competing with us in the end. That is to everybody’s benefit, ourselves included.” He further adds that “if everybody’s got their own little ecosystem – number one, it’s very inefficient, and number two, that limits our ability to compete.”
This reaction isn’t surprising, seeing how Team Green is gobbling market share like there’s no tomorrow. As the saying goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Both Intel and AMD have tried to claim market share from Nvidia, generally to no avail. And with Nvidia’s upcoming Blackwell accelerators looming on the horizon, the only reasonable solution is to leave their differences aside and team up against this menace.
Since AMD and Intel are unlikely to cooperate on a processor architecture, they choose the next best thing: a solution to link hundreds of CPUs inside a datacentre. In other words, it’s an alternative to Nvidia’s NVLink and NVSwitch, which allow multiple GPUs to appear as a single massive chip, simplifying programming and improving performance. For example, Nvidia can stitch together 72 Blackwell GPUs and 36 Grace CPUs in a fully connected NVLink switch rack, delivering up to 720PFlop of training power.
To make this happen, AMD will work with Intel, Broadcom, Cisco, Google, HPE, Meta, and Microsoft. The result could be a universal and open-source high-speed interconnect similar to Ethernet. “We talked a lot about the Ultra Ethernet standard and Ultra Accelerator Link … We think those are critical elements to enabling the industry to come together and innovate – to still have optimized solutions, but not locking them down so as to be proprietary solutions,” Norrod continued.
An open-source solution is surely the way to go to have any chance against the advances Nvidia has. As Norrod perfectly puts it “closed system is a bet that your engineers are better than everybody else’s engineers combined.”