AMD’s CEO Teases the OAM Accelerator Era on Twitter

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Lisa Su AMD Accelerated Data Center November 2021
Lisa Su AMD Accelerated Data Center November 2021

This morning on Twitter, Lisa Su, AMD’s CEO posted a picture of a server. While that is exciting, there was some confusion on what the server is showing. While I checked, and STH is under embargo for next week’s event, AMD posted a picture so we wanted to at least clear up what is visually being shown.

AMD’s CEO Teases the OAM Accelerator Era on Twitter

Here is the tweet that folks are talking about:

In that tweet, here is the image. We will note that the AMD EPYC and AMD Instinct brands are featured. EPYC is its CPU brand. Instinct is its GPU brand:

Lisa Su AMD Accelerated Data Center November 2021
Lisa Su AMD Accelerated Data Center November 2021

On the bottom of AMD’s photo, we can see two AMD EPYC CPUs. Most STH readers will recognize the sockets from our various reviews, including this week’s ASRock Rack ROME2D16-2T Dual AMD EPYC motherboard review. What is different is that we see 16 DIMM slots compared to the below, but even the current generation systems support 2DPC.

ASRock Rack ROME2D16 2T Socket SP3 And Memory
ASRock Rack ROME2D16 2T Socket SP3 And Memory

The bigger disclosure from this picture is the eight large heatsinks on accelerators. These are OAM modules. At STH we have been covering OAM for some time. Companies like Facebook have the Zion Accelerator Platform for OAM.

Facebook Zion OAM Module With Cooling
Facebook Zion OAM Module With Cooling

OAM is going to be the new standard that is going to take the place of more proprietary solutions such as NVLink that NVIDIA uses in systems like theĀ Dell EMC PowerEdge XE8545 we reviewed. The market has responded with the UBB or Universal Base Board design that fits eight accelerators to a PCB and has interconnected wires between them and then allows for cabled external connections.

Inspur OAI UBB
Inspur OAI UBB

Here is the explosion of an OAM system from Inspur:

OCP OAM UBB Breakaway
OCP OAM UBB Breakaway

Here is another view of the Facebook OAM system where the accelerators are closer in orientation to AMD’s picture.

Facebook Zion
Facebook Zion

Hyper-scale clients are demanding OAM, and it is becoming like the OCP NIC 3.0 where we are seeing vendors adopt it both on the card and accelerator side as well as systems vendors. As a few examples, here is the Habana Labs Gaudi HLS-1 system that has the eight OAM array:

Habana Labs Gaudi HLS 1 OAM System
Habana Labs Gaudi HLS 1 OAM System

Here is Intel Ponte Vecchio in an OAM form factor.

Intel Architecture Day 2021 Ponte Vecchio OAM Module
Intel Architecture Day 2021 Ponte Vecchio OAM Module

Other vendors such as Enflame also have OAM.

Enflame CloudBlazer T11 OAM
Enflame CloudBlazer T11 OAM

Xilinx for its part showed an OAM card at last year’s OCP Summit. AMD is also one of the contributors to the OAI-UBB spec:

OAI UBB Spec V1.1 Contributors
OAI UBB Spec V1.1 Contributors

The point here is that OAM is going to be a large ecosystem because major cloud providers are pushing for an open standard rather than a closed SXM/ NVLink standard. AMD just showed off an AMD EPYC server with eight OAM accelerators.

Final Words

Although the clues are all out there on what this is, we are under embargo so all we can cover is the image released. Still, OAM is going to be a driving force in the industry that will help connect, power, and cool 500W-800W accelerators. Major industry players have been onboard for years. Expect more of this coming in 2022 on STH even beyond our coverage of the AMD data center event next week where we discuss what is under those big heatsinks.

Perhaps not coincidentally, OCP Summit 2021 is next week as well that STH will be covering.

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