The AI-chip race
AI芯片竞赛
Could AMD break Nvidia’s chokehold on chips?
AMD能否打破英伟达的芯片垄断？
Taking on the top AI chipmaker will be hard—but maybe not impossible
挑战AI芯片老大绝非易事，但未必不可能
“IT IS THE most advanced AI accelerator in the industry,” boasted Lisa Su, boss of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), at the launch in December of its new MI300 chip. Ms Su rattled off a series of technical specifications: 153bn transistors, 192 gigabytes of memory and 5.3 terabytes per second of memory bandwidth. That is, respectively, about 2, 2.4 and 1.6 times more than the H100, the top-of-the-line artificial-intelligence chip made by Nvidia. That rival chipmaker’s prowess in the semiconductors fuelling the AI boom has, over the past year, turned it into America’s fifth-most-valuable company, with a market capitalisation of $1.5trn. Yet most experts agreed that the numbers and Ms Su weren’t lying: the MI300 does indeed outshine the H100. Investors liked it, too—AMD’s share price jumped by 10% the next day.
“这是目前业界最先进的AI加速器。”去年12月，AMD的老板苏姿丰在MI300芯片的新品发布会上夸耀道。苏姿丰一气说出了这款芯片的一系列技术参数：1530亿个晶体管、192GB的内存、每秒5.3TB的内存带宽。这分别是其竞争对手英伟达制造的顶级AI芯片H100的大约2倍、2.4倍和1.6倍。英伟达凭借其在半导体领域的实力推动了AI的繁荣，并在过去一年时间里以1.5万亿美元的市值晋身美国第五大公司。不过，大多数专家都认为AMD的这些参数是真实的，苏姿丰也没有夸大其词：MI300确实比H100更胜一筹。投资者也乐见其成——AMD的股价在第二天大涨了10%。
- 拓展学习：熟词僻义 | boast 并不完全是“吹嘘”
- rattle sth↔off 脱口而出；不假思索地说出
- rival 竞争对手
- outshine 比……做得好；使逊色；高人一筹
On January 30th, in its quarterly earnings call, AMD announced that it expected to sell $3.5bn-worth of MI300s this year. It also reported strong revenues of $23bn in 2023, four times what they had been in 2014, when Ms Su became chief executive. Its market value is up 100-fold on her watch, to $270bn. Relative to forecast profits in the next 12 months, its valuation is richer even than Nvidia’s. Last year it displaced Intel, which once ruled American chipmaking, as the country’s second-most-valuable semiconductor company. Now it is taking aim at the biggest.
1月30日，AMD在季度财报电话会议上宣布，预计今年MI300的销售额会达到35亿美元。它还报称2023年营收表现强劲，达到230亿美元，是2014年苏姿丰出任CEO时的四倍。在她的执掌下，AMD的市值增长了100倍，达到2700亿美元。相对于未来12个月的预期利润而言，AMD的估值甚至超过了英伟达。去年，它取代了曾是美国芯片制造业霸主的英特尔，成为美国市值第二高的半导体公司。现在它的目标是成为美国第一。
- displace 取代；替代；置换
