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Can you folks add performance per watt as a metric to these comparisons, I honestly want to understand where AMD fits in the stack in terms of actual performanc

by minraws 3mo ago

Can you folks add performance per watt as a metric to these comparisons, I honestly want to understand where AMD fits in the stack in terms of actual performance to dollars. I have had talks with companies wanting to build data centers outside of US and find it hard to source anything Nvidia in sufficient capacity and scale. If AMD is competitive performance per watt and roughly reliable in terms of software support which is what most folks outside of US prioritize above all else, since outside of China and US electricity tends to at a relative premium. Maybe if they make smaller data centers viable at the right price, AMD could be part of the stack outside of US where ever Nvidia is more limited in supply. Though I have genuinely no idea what sourcing an AMD GPU looks like. I have never seen a company use AMD outside of wafer and a couple others mostly in US. Genuinely intriguing or maybe not really (could be this stuff is common knowledge) and I am just stuck in my Nvidia bubble here.

craftkiller 3mo ago
> I have never seen a company use AMD Meta is using AMD: https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-2-24-amd-and-meta-announce-expanded-strategic-partnersh.html https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-2-24-amd... And OpenAI: https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-10-6-amd-and-openai-announce-strategic-partnership-to-d.html https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-10-6-amd...
- Schiendelman 3mo ago
  It's not clear when this will be - AMD has slipped these dates likely to 2027.
- minraws 3mo ago
  OpenAI maybe, but a few friends in Meta said they don't so dunno man. Seems sus atm. But it's meta they can get a GW up of AMD in a year
Twirrim 3mo ago
> I have never seen a company use AMD outside of wafer and a couple others mostly in US. There's a few using them, and even more starting to experiment with them. AMD has long been a source of disappointment around this side of things, so I'm hesitant to feel optimistic we'll finally get some competition. The market really needs viable competition to Nvidia, especially performance/watt.
deleted 3mo ago
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technoabsurdist 3mo ago
AMD MI355X uses 1,400W per GPU and NVIDIA B200 uses 1,200W. So AMD uses about 16% more power.
- vlovich123 3mo ago
  Not how you measure performance per watt but generally it’s 20-60% worse at tok/s/watt not 16. It does have ~50% more memory (~100gb) which complicates the comparison.
kingstnap 3mo ago
A DGX B200 costs like ~$0.5 M and uses around 14 kW. If you plan to run it straight for 8 years 100% max usage thats around 1 GWhr. A gigawatt hour is a lot of energy but its not that much compared to the price of the actual machine. In Germany for example with its expensive energy thats about €100k worth, which spread over 8 years is pretty minor compared to the up front half mill. The real issue with high power consumption is not really the cost of energy but the limited powersupply you can get for a datacenter. A more efficient setup is highly desirable because it means you can fit more in the limited power hookup.
- dannyw 3mo ago
  It’s more than power supply. Cooling and ventilation becomes a MUCH bigger deal at rack scale, and that costs electricity too.
  - thereisnospork 3mo ago
    Cooling demand is only fractional with respect to the load: cooling 1MW of heat will only cost a few 10's to low 100's of kW, depending on the specifics. 10-20% overhead on cooling is probably a close enough estimate for napkin math.
  - psychoslave 3mo ago
    And datacenters have impact on everything around them. If at the end of the day to result is a few more yachts and jets and, a lot more of miserable humans starving in ruined ecosystems, maybe that’s not the best go-to direction.
    - butvacuum 3mo ago
      You say they have a large impact, but having lived somewhere with some of the largest data centers- they very much don't. At least not more so then any other structure that paves over greenery. love to debate actual discission points. pull up "datacenter dfw" on google maps for mine.
latchkey 3mo ago
> I have never seen a company use AMD outside of wafer and a couple others mostly in US. Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. We've serviced over 700 customers on our MI300x.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
7thpower 3mo ago
Typically any company that can’t get Nvidia to fill their orders will have at least some AMD.
- embedding-shape 3mo ago
  What type of company are you talking about here? Granted, nowadays I mostly interact with ML-adjacent companies but almost none would go "Hmm, hard to get nvidia hardware today, lets dump all expertise and knowledge of CUDA et al we have and start using AMD hardware until we can get nvidia", everyone would just wait or rent in the meantime.
  - wongarsu 3mo ago
    Inference workloads are usually a lot less picky about the exact hardware than model training. At least in the cases I know of the models are trained on Nvidia hardware, then exported and run on a mix of Nvidia and AMD
    - minraws 3mo ago
      At scale for inference it's almost non-existent for a data center company to go for AMD because they couldn't get or afford Nvidia atm. They instead start the build out and plug in stuff they can, then take a loan or ask Nvidia to help fund it. (I am not joking) I believe the case is if you can prove to Nvidia you can install and provide more Nvidia capacity they help out because more Capacity going online today is in the best interest of Nvidia. Spot prices of Nvidia GPUs going up is not good news for Nvidia btw. The people renting Nvidia has the least amount of friction in moving off Nvidia, especially with AI tools you could build and get up to speed with AMD stack much sooner... So if Nvidia is truly not an option and you entire company is not a bet on Nvidia then you will move off but only as a renter not as a buyer unless they truly can't fund Nvidia I suppose. But again I repeat if you build a datacenter and provide good enough base Nvidia will help fund you to a mostly complete data center. People might not like it but that's the reason Nvidia is so unreasonably dominant even now when otherwise given the scale of investments it might have been cheaper to look for alternatives. This is why Nvidia doesn't like the China stack.
embedding-shape 3mo ago
> I have never seen a company use AMD outside of wafer and a couple others mostly in US. Worth remembering AMD basically "owns" (not literally) the hardware-side of things in video games consoles for good many years now, with no end in sight.
- ekianjo 3mo ago
  Because they have x86 CPU licenses.
  - embedding-shape 3mo ago
    Every single video game console of the last generation (and probably further back) are using AMD Radeon for graphics too FWIW. I think the Switch might be the only outlier recently using nvidia graphics.
  - wongarsu 3mo ago
    Consoles used to all be custom architectures. If Intel was the only one doing x86 and AMD had offered the same price, performance and features as they do now, but in another architecture, my bet is that in that universe AMD would still have gotten the contract. Using x86 is a big deal to simplify things, but so is AMD's APU with unified memory between CPU and GPU (similar to what Apple now does with their silicon)
  - duped 3mo ago
    AMD invented x86_64
- minraws 3mo ago
  I was talking in the data center gpu context, EPYCs are pretty common in data centers these days. I have a huge EPYC based data center like 200-300+km from my house on the outskirts of the city a few dozen miles from a IT industry tech park(place with lots of IT company offices).
jingpostmedia 3mo ago
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jingpostmedia 3mo ago
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by minraws 3mo ago

craftkiller 3mo ago

> I have never seen a company use AMD Meta is using AMD: https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-2-24-amd-and-meta-announce-expanded-strategic-partnersh.html https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-2-24-amd... And OpenAI: https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-10-6-amd-and-openai-announce-strategic-partnership-to-d.html https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-10-6-amd...

Schiendelman 3mo ago
It's not clear when this will be - AMD has slipped these dates likely to 2027.
minraws 3mo ago
OpenAI maybe, but a few friends in Meta said they don't so dunno man. Seems sus atm. But it's meta they can get a GW up of AMD in a year

Twirrim 3mo ago

> I have never seen a company use AMD outside of wafer and a couple others mostly in US. There's a few using them, and even more starting to experiment with them. AMD has long been a source of disappointment around this side of things, so I'm hesitant to feel optimistic we'll finally get some competition. The market really needs viable competition to Nvidia, especially performance/watt.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

technoabsurdist 3mo ago

AMD MI355X uses 1,400W per GPU and NVIDIA B200 uses 1,200W. So AMD uses about 16% more power.

vlovich123 3mo ago
Not how you measure performance per watt but generally it’s 20-60% worse at tok/s/watt not 16. It does have ~50% more memory (~100gb) which complicates the comparison.

kingstnap 3mo ago

A DGX B200 costs like ~$0.5 M and uses around 14 kW. If you plan to run it straight for 8 years 100% max usage thats around 1 GWhr. A gigawatt hour is a lot of energy but its not that much compared to the price of the actual machine. In Germany for example with its expensive energy thats about €100k worth, which spread over 8 years is pretty minor compared to the up front half mill. The real issue with high power consumption is not really the cost of energy but the limited powersupply you can get for a datacenter. A more efficient setup is highly desirable because it means you can fit more in the limited power hookup.

dannyw 3mo ago
It’s more than power supply. Cooling and ventilation becomes a MUCH bigger deal at rack scale, and that costs electricity too.
- thereisnospork 3mo ago
  Cooling demand is only fractional with respect to the load: cooling 1MW of heat will only cost a few 10's to low 100's of kW, depending on the specifics. 10-20% overhead on cooling is probably a close enough estimate for napkin math.
- psychoslave 3mo ago
  And datacenters have impact on everything around them. If at the end of the day to result is a few more yachts and jets and, a lot more of miserable humans starving in ruined ecosystems, maybe that’s not the best go-to direction.
  - butvacuum 3mo ago
    You say they have a large impact, but having lived somewhere with some of the largest data centers- they very much don't. At least not more so then any other structure that paves over greenery. love to debate actual discission points. pull up "datacenter dfw" on google maps for mine.

latchkey 3mo ago

> I have never seen a company use AMD outside of wafer and a couple others mostly in US. Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. We've serviced over 700 customers on our MI300x.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

7thpower 3mo ago

Typically any company that can’t get Nvidia to fill their orders will have at least some AMD.

embedding-shape 3mo ago
What type of company are you talking about here? Granted, nowadays I mostly interact with ML-adjacent companies but almost none would go "Hmm, hard to get nvidia hardware today, lets dump all expertise and knowledge of CUDA et al we have and start using AMD hardware until we can get nvidia", everyone would just wait or rent in the meantime.
- wongarsu 3mo ago
  Inference workloads are usually a lot less picky about the exact hardware than model training. At least in the cases I know of the models are trained on Nvidia hardware, then exported and run on a mix of Nvidia and AMD
  - minraws 3mo ago
    At scale for inference it's almost non-existent for a data center company to go for AMD because they couldn't get or afford Nvidia atm. They instead start the build out and plug in stuff they can, then take a loan or ask Nvidia to help fund it. (I am not joking) I believe the case is if you can prove to Nvidia you can install and provide more Nvidia capacity they help out because more Capacity going online today is in the best interest of Nvidia. Spot prices of Nvidia GPUs going up is not good news for Nvidia btw. The people renting Nvidia has the least amount of friction in moving off Nvidia, especially with AI tools you could build and get up to speed with AMD stack much sooner... So if Nvidia is truly not an option and you entire company is not a bet on Nvidia then you will move off but only as a renter not as a buyer unless they truly can't fund Nvidia I suppose. But again I repeat if you build a datacenter and provide good enough base Nvidia will help fund you to a mostly complete data center. People might not like it but that's the reason Nvidia is so unreasonably dominant even now when otherwise given the scale of investments it might have been cheaper to look for alternatives. This is why Nvidia doesn't like the China stack.

embedding-shape 3mo ago

> I have never seen a company use AMD outside of wafer and a couple others mostly in US. Worth remembering AMD basically "owns" (not literally) the hardware-side of things in video games consoles for good many years now, with no end in sight.

ekianjo 3mo ago
Because they have x86 CPU licenses.
- embedding-shape 3mo ago
  Every single video game console of the last generation (and probably further back) are using AMD Radeon for graphics too FWIW. I think the Switch might be the only outlier recently using nvidia graphics.
- wongarsu 3mo ago
  Consoles used to all be custom architectures. If Intel was the only one doing x86 and AMD had offered the same price, performance and features as they do now, but in another architecture, my bet is that in that universe AMD would still have gotten the contract. Using x86 is a big deal to simplify things, but so is AMD's APU with unified memory between CPU and GPU (similar to what Apple now does with their silicon)
- duped 3mo ago
  AMD invented x86_64
minraws 3mo ago
I was talking in the data center gpu context, EPYCs are pretty common in data centers these days. I have a huge EPYC based data center like 200-300+km from my house on the outskirts of the city a few dozen miles from a IT industry tech park(place with lots of IT company offices).

jingpostmedia 3mo ago

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jingpostmedia 3mo ago

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