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AMD’s Untether AI Deal - Bad Signs for GPU-Driven AI training
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this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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GPUs are basically halfway to ASICs already. Probably about half of a lot of modern GPU die area is dedicated to or needed to support specialized AI hardware.
I think the next steps are integrated memory and compute, and ternary operations. Integrated memory and compute would probably need specialized hardware, I doubt it would make sense to include anything other than matrix operations and some common AI functions in that sort of processor.
Also, isn't that just an NPU?
They aren't specialized though!
There are a lot of directions "AI" could go:
There's all sorts of wild directions the sector could go. Having the flexibility of an ASIC die would be a huge benefit for AMD, as they don't have to 'commit' to any particular direction like Nvidia's monolithic dies. If a new trend takes off, they can take an existing die and swap out the ASIC relatively quickly, without taping out a whole new GPU.
What about an asic makes it more flexible or easy to swap out? I thought it was just a general term for any application specific chip.
I think NVIDIA's strategy is to have high throughout and compute for fp4,8,16,32,bf8,sparsity,etc and not really commit to much. I guess if the application is very well known there's a bit of overhead in that.
I'm not in industry or anything so I'm not very confident in this but I don't really see how an ASIC would be that different overall
Because it’s a separate physical die.
Taping out, aka simply designing a large GPU chip for production is at least a 9 figure cost. Hence Nvidia/AMD offer a relatively small selection of physical dies in products, as each die has a huge fixed cost. But AMD has specifically taken the approach of splitting up chips into smaller sections, and linking them together by placing them right next to each other, stacking them, and so on.
Hence, if AMD, say, acquire a niche ASIC company, theoretically they can slap a variant of their design next to existing GPUs, or even next to existing CPUs, and have it share the memory bus, general compute, and other functions, without paying the full 9 figures for a massive new chip. There’s still testing costs, but it’s not so prohibitive.