AMD invited us to their biggest launch of the year to check out the behind-the-scenes. At Advancing AI 2026, @AnushElangovan (VP, AI Software at AMD) and @QuentinAnthon15 (VP, AI Engineering at Zyphra) join @sophiadew on the floor to break down Helios, ROCm AI, and the Anthropic partnership, live the day it all shipped: 1:05 What actually changed today: AMD goes rack-scale 3:03 ROCm skills land in Claude Code and Codex 3:51 Why Zyphra bet its whole stack on AMD 3:57 Sparse mixture-of-experts and the HBM advantage 6:25 Why an open stack beats a closed one 8:52 The wall of logos: Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta 9:27 Why the frontier labs are committing gigawatts 11:30 Why the next wave will exceed expectations 17:02 Frontier models running on your own laptop + DeepSeek V4 Pro at 8-10 tokens/sec 17:41 How ROCm AI hits 3.3x inference gains 19:38 A kernel rewritten overnight with no humans in the loop 21:40 Do you still need kernel experts? 23:47 Why CPUs are critical for the agentic AI era 25:40 An agent that's been rewriting a driver for four months 28:14 The internet parallel, and the dark-fiber lesson

AMD CEO Lisa Su doubled down on her support for open-source AI models on Thursday, reaffirming her commitment to the framework after a high-profile OpenAI security breach was resolved by an open-source model.

AMD AI Takeaways Note •AI accelerator market now seen at $1.4T by 2030 (up from $1T prior). We also raises forecast to $1T by 2028, backed by our bottom-up analysis •Server CPU TAM also boosted to >$220B by 2030. Agentic AI expected to be ~50% of TAM, with CPU:GPU ratio tightening toward 1:1. •MI455X is a major leap: 34x higher throughput & 18x lower token cost vs MI355X. Already outperforming Nvidia B200 in some LLM inference. •MI500 brings optical interconnects, ahead of Nvidia Rubin Ultra in key areas (HBM, 4-die package, scale-up domain). •Venice CPU strongest for AI workloads: 2.2x/2.0x higher throughput vs competitors. We estimate ~300k CoWoS builds expected in 2027 → big ASP uplift. 📈 No change to estimates and TP #AMD# #AdvancingAI#

AMD CEO Lisa Su just said she expects the AI Accelerator market to hit $1.4 Trillion by 2030 "By the end of the decade, the AI accelerator market is going to approach the size of the entire semiconductor market today"

AMD plans to ship Helios, its first rack-scale AI system to rival Nvidia, later in 2026 to Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI, and others; Helios costs an estimated $5M+ (@katietarasov / CNBC) (Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)

AMD AND MICROSOFT EXPANDED PARTNERSHIP $AMD just announced an expanded strategic partnership spanning AMD GPUs, CPUs, networking and software on Microsoft $MSFT Azure. "Microsoft to ramp AMD Helios™ at scale on Azure to power frontier model inference for Microsoft, its AI customers and Azure AI services. Azure will add two new VMs powered by 6th Gen AMD EPYC™ "Venice" processors Azure deploys AMD Pensando™ DPUs in AMD AI backend networking infrastructure and select Azure services. The companies are integrating AMD silicon with Azure Boost to scale cloud networking performance across the fleet."

AMD may be getting its own version of Multi Frame Generation, based on new information in the latest Radeon drivers. Leaked driver files include options for Multi Frame Generation with settings from 1x to 8x. They also mention other AI graphics features, including Ray Regeneration and Neural Radiance Caching, suggesting AMD is working on a major FSR update. If launched, it could generate AI frames similar to Nvidia’s Multi Frame Generation. However, AMD hasn’t confirmed how it will work, what GPUs will support it, or when it might be released. For now, this is based on hidden driver code, so nothing is official.

AMD and the HandBrake developers have fixed a major performance issue that affected high-core-count CPUs. HandBrake was not handling systems with more than 64 threads efficiently, leaving many CPU cores underused. In some cases, this caused performance to drop by as much as 60%. The issue has been fixed in HandBrake 1.11.0, bringing huge performance gains. According to AMD, encoding performance can improve by up to 181% on the 96-core Threadripper PRO 9995WX and up to 215% on the 64-core Threadripper 7980X.