AMD Announces Annual Updates for Instinct Accelerators and Helios Racks; MI500 and MI600 to Launch in 2027 and 2028

AMD plans to update its Instinct artificial intelligence accelerators and Helios rack solutions annually. In 2027, the company will release the Instinct MI500 family with HBM4E memory, which AMD claims will be 2000 times more powerful than the MI300X launched in 2023 — previously, the company had forecast only a 1000-fold increase. The MI500 accelerators will be manufactured using a 2-nanometer process and will for the first time feature optical interconnects in addition to traditional copper ones. HBM4E memory was introduced by Samsung and SK hynix just a few weeks before the announcement. In 2028, the Instinct MI600 based on the CDNA Next architecture will arrive, details of which have not yet been disclosed. AMD sells accelerators as part of complete Helios server racks, with clients including Anthropic and Microsoft. Following the current Helios, the Helios 500 will be released in 2027, featuring energy-efficient Epyc 9006 (Zen 6) processors and Pensando network controllers. By 2028, the Helios 600 platform will be ready, with MI600 accelerators and Ferrara processors based on Zen 7 cores, along with new Pensando Palma and Levanzo networking solutions. Competition with Nvidia: Nvidia's Feynman architecture, the successor to Rubin, will only arrive in 2028, so the MI500 will compete against Rubin, and the MI600 against Feynman.