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AMD first teased its monstrous MI300 family of AI accelerators over a year ago and eventually launched them in late 2023. Since they are relatively new to the market, we still don’t have a lot of benchmarks to compare these accelerators to Nvidia’s hardware. But we now have at least one: the Geekbench OpenCL test. AMD’s MI300X GPU has appeared in the online results for this benchmark, and it has arrived in the number one spot, bumping the RTX 4090 from its perch. This is obviously not a fair fight, but it’s interesting to see these two GPUs compared head-to-head.
The MI300X achieved a score in the OpenCL benchmark of 379,660, the best of any GPU so far. For reference, an RTX 4090 can typically score around 320,000, so the MI300X has a sizable advantage. That’s unsurprising, of course, as the MI300X is a full-blown data center GPU with a TDP of 750W and 192GB of high-bandwidth memory, compared with a $1,700 consumer GPU with 24GB of GDDR6X memory. There’s also a slight price difference, with the MI300X going for around $15,000, according to TechRadar, versus the RTX 4090’s $1,599 MSRP.
AMD’s MI300X is competing with Nvidia’s H100 and B100 data center GPUs, so this comparison isn’t exactly fair.
Credit: AMD
Even though a data center card appearing on a benchmark chart primarily full of consumer GPUs is uncommon, there are already similar cards in the rankings. For example, Nvidia’s L40S GPU is also at the top of the OpenCL benchmark chart, as the MI300X listing has not been officially added to the chart yet, or so it appears. That is also a data center GPU from the Ada Lovelace generation (which is the latest), and it has a score of 352,507, so it’s in the MI300X’s neighborhood.
There are also a few Nvidia Quadro and server cards in the rankings, but the upper echelon of this test’s leaderboard is comprised entirely of Nvidia cards. It’s unusual for an AMD card to not only appear in this rarified air but to displace all other entrants. As it stands now, the first AMD card to appear aside from the MI300X is the flagship Radeon RX 7900 XTX, which holds down 14th place with a score of 207,354.
Though AMD’s MI300X accelerator is less than a year old, AMD is already considering upgrading its memory from HBM3 to faster HBM3e in 2024. The revamped card will be dubbed MI325X and is due in Q4 of 2024 to go head-to-head with Nvidia’s new Blackwell GPUs.