Nvidia and AMD (ATi) have always been into constant competition with one another. It is evident with the launch of Radeon Instinct range of accelerators by AMD to counter the Nvidia Tesla series. How do they compare with each other? AMD Radeon Instinct vs Nvidia Tesla? Let us check out the features and their specific differences in the following paragraphs.
AMD Radeon Instinct – An Overview
Well, the Radeon Instinct range of GPUs is primarily meant for deep learning and computation heavy workloads. Specially created for the sake of accelerated machine learning with native GPU offloading, the GPUs are available in multiple versions. As we already stated, they are designed to compete with the Nvidia range of deep-learning GPU cards, Tesla.
AMD has initially released three significant variants of GPUs in the Radeon Instinct series. The MI6, MI8, and MI25 have the following specifications –
- The MI16 accelerator is based on the Polaris GPU and is passively cooled. It provides you with 5.7 TFLOPS of peak FP16 performance.
- The MI18 accelerators come with a smaller form factor. They offer you an 8.2 TFLOPS of peak FP16 performance.
- The MI25 is the most powerful of the lot. It runs on the Vega GPU architecture and offers high-end performance. The GPU is expected to provide 12.3 TFLOPS of peak theoretical performance.
Nvidia Tesla – An Introduction
The Nvidia Tesla range of GPUs is a brand name for their products targeting stream processing (Parallel computational tasks), general-purpose GPU for gaming, or for deep learning algorithms. The GPUs comes with a high computational power in comparison to microprocessors. The compute cards lacks display outputs and is a key differentiator from their Quadro or Geforce counterparts.
The Nvidia Tesla GPUs are meant to be one of the best options for accelerating HPC and hyperscale data center workloads. It can be used for a variety of applications ranging from energy exploration to deep learning. It supports APIs in the form of OpenACC and OpenCL.
The Nvidia Tesla GPUs are designed to enhance the throughput. They are already present in some of the leading cloud vendors service offerings such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon’s AWS. The customers should ideally be able to save up to 70 percent of the data center costs, due to relatively lower power consumtion.
AMD Radeon Instinct vs Nvidia Tesla: How Do They Compare?
Well, as is evident from the above discussion, it should be apparent enough that they compete for one-upmanship in the same arena.
From the status available as of now, it is quite clear that AMD takes over the Nvidia offering in a few aspects.
Here is the comparison table for the competing GPUs –
| Features/Particulars | Tesla P100
| Radeon Instinct MI25
|
| Architecture | Pascal | Vega |
| Number of CUDA Cores | 3584 | More than 4096 |
| FP 16 Performance | 21.2 TFLOPS | 25 TFLOPS |
| FP 32 Performance | 10.6 TFLOPS | 12.5 TFLOPS |
| FP 64 Performance | 5.3 TFLOPS | 6.25 TFLOPS |
| Maximum VRAM amount | 16 GB HBM2 | 16 GB HBM2 |
| Maximum TDP | 300 W | More than 300 W |
| Interconnection options | NVLink | Anyone |
| Bandwidth Needs | 732 GB per sec | 512 GB per sec |
A Detailed Comparison between the Two Competing GPUs
We will make a comparison based on the different aspects of the competing components one by one. This will help us understand the competing products in a better manner.
General Specification
| Features/Particulars | Tesla P100
| Radeon Instinct MI25
|
| Platform | Pascal | GCN 5th Gen |
| Meant for | Desktop | Desktop |
| Launch Date | June 2017 | April 2016 |
Technical Specifications
| Features/Particulars | Tesla P100
| Radeon Instinct MI25
|
| Total Pipelines | 3584 | 4096 |
| Clock Speed | 1328 MHz | 1400 MHz |
| Boost Clock Speed | 1480 MHz | 1500 MHz |
| No of Transistors | 15300 Million | 12500 Million |
| Manufacturing technology | 16 nm | 14 nm |
| Power Consumption | 300 W | 300 W |
| Floating point performance | 10609 GFLOPS | 12288 GFLOPS |
Memory Specifications
| Features/Particulars | Tesla P100
| Radeon Instinct MI25
|
| Type of Memory | HBM2 | HBM2 |
| Maximum RAM Amount | 16 GB | 16 GB |
| Bus Width for Memory | 4096 bit | 2048 bit |
| Clock speed for Memory | 1408 MHz | 1886 MHz |
| Bandwidth for Memory | 720.9 GB per sec | 482.8 GB per sec |
Compatibility and Dimensions
| Features/Particulars | Tesla P100
| Radeon Instinct MI25
|
| GPU Interface | PCIe 3.0 x 16 | PCIe 3.0 x 16 |
| Length | NA | 267 mm |
| Width | NA | 2 slot |
| Supplementary Power Connectors | Nil | 2 x 8 pin |
Which one among Them Should You Go With?
Well, which one among these two options should you go with? It may not be so easy to differentiate them without actual real-world test results. Well, it would be dependent upon your exact requirements. How about checking out a few advantages that AMD Radeon Instinct has over Tesla?
- AMD Radeon Instinct is comparatively newer with a newer fabrication process.
- It comes with more pipelines as opposed to the Nvidia Tesla.
- The manufacturing process utilized on AMD Radeon Instinct is comparatively finer (lithography process) and technologically advanced.
What does Nvidia Tesla range of GPUs have to outperform the AMD Radeon Instinct range?
- It has a wider memory bus with 4096 as opposed to 2048 bits
- It comes with a higher memory bandwidth than the AMD counterpart.
There are practically no measures that would make us believe that any one of them would be better than the other. There are no extensive test results available as of now. That way, it may not be possible to choose one over the other as such.
You can check the individual features and then choose the one that would exactly meet your requirements.
In Conclusion
Well, that was all we have as of now concerning the comparison between AMD Radeon Instinct and Nvidia Tesla GPUs. Please note that the above indicators are based on the features and specifications available from the manufacturers. The exact results can only be available through the test results.
Also, note that we have chosen Tesla P100 and Radeon Instinct MI25 as the representatives for Nvidia Tesla and AMD Radeon Instinct families respectively. However, that should not have any significant differences as such.
