121 of the world’s fastest supercomputers are now powered by AMD.

The latest release of the Top 500 list, ranking the world’s fastest supercomputers, showcases AMD’s remarkable achievements. AMD has secured its position as a dominant force, with 121 systems powered by their silicon, marking a year-over-year increase of 29%. Moreover, AMD proudly holds the top spot on the Top 500 with the Frontier supercomputer, while its test and development system, based on the same architecture, maintain the second spot in power efficiency on the Green 500 list. Notably, AMD CPUs drive seven out of the top ten systems on the Green 500 list.

Frontier, the AMD-powered supercomputer, stands out as the sole fully-qualified exascale-class system worldwide. In contrast, the Intel-powered two-exaflop Aurora has yet to submit a benchmark result after numerous delays. Frontier, on the other hand, is fully operational and actively utilized by researchers across various scientific workloads.

Impressively, Frontier has shown significant improvement through tuning. While it initially entered the Top 500 list with a performance of 1.02 exaflops in June 2022, it has now increased to 1.194 exaflops, representing a remarkable 17% improvement. These advancements were achieved with the same 8,699,904 CPU cores it debuted with. To put this achievement into perspective, the additional 92 petaflops gained from tuning equates to the computational power of the entire Perlmutter system, which ranks eighth on the Top 500.

While holding the top spot on the Top 500 is a notable accomplishment, many other AMD-powered systems also feature prominently. Four out of the top ten spots are occupied by supercomputers powered by AMD CPUs, while Intel and IBM each power two of the top ten systems. AMD CPUs are also responsible for 12 of the top 20 fastest systems globally.

Although Intel CPUs still dominate the Top 500 list in terms of total system numbers, AMD continues to expand its share, with 21 out of the 44 new systems added in the past year being powered by AMD silicon.

Frontier also excels in the HLP-MxP benchmark, which measures high-performance computing (HPC) and AI performance in mixed-precision workloads. It achieves a remarkable 9.95 exaflops, surpassing its previous score of 7.9 exaflops. Additionally, the AMD-powered LUMI supercomputer secures the second spot with 2.2 exaflops.

In the HPCG benchmark, which focuses on system-level performance, Frontier ranks second with 14.05 HPCG-Pflops. The AMD-powered LUMI takes the second spot with 3.41 HPCG-Pflops, while Fugaku retains the top position with 16 HPCG-Pflops.

AMD’s continued advancement in the upper ranks of the Top 500, Green 500, HPCG, and HLP-MXP benchmarks, along with its growing share of new systems, demonstrates the performance advantage of its CPUs over competing Intel alternatives. The trends observed in the Top 500 often extend to the broader data center market, boding well for AMD’s EPYC server chips in the coming year.

Looking ahead, AMD’s upcoming El Capitan supercomputer, projected to achieve 2 exaflops and surpass Frontier, is powered by the revolutionary Instinct MI300 silicon. This innovative chip combines CPUs and GPUs in the same processor package, creating an exascale APU. The El Capitan system is expected to become operational in late 2023.