AMD‘s first-quarter report/earnings call for investors has revealed that the company will soon merge the capabilities of EPYC CPUs and Xilinx FPGA AI engines on one single chip. The FPGA and AI accelerator company, Xilinx, was acquired by AMD in February 2022 after rumors going way back to October 2020.
First products in 2023
AMD is planning to deliver its first Xilinx FPGA-AI accelerator-powered EPYC CPUs in 2023. This plan is not a surprising one since AMD has patented some CPU designs in April 2022. The surprising factor is the quickness of its arrival since the company acquired Xilinx just 3 months ago.
CPU designing requires very sophisticated engineering, as expected. Delivering a product that combines two different chip types in just 10-to-22-months is something hard to achieve. We guess AMD’s chipset design approach made it easier to fuse machine learning accelerators into CPUs. You can see one of the patents that replaces one of the chiplets with a machine learning unit that includes four machine learning accelerator cores:
The specifics of the upcoming products are not clear yet. However, those machine learning cores will likely be utilized for executing functions of pre-trained AI models.