Hardware & Compute

MoonMath AI Open-Sources a HIP Attention Kernel for AMD MI300X That Beats AITER v3 on Every Shape and Rounding Mode

MoonMath AI team has released a bf16 forward attention kernel for AMD’s MI300X GPU. It is written in HIP, not hand-written assembly. The code is open-source under the MIT license. The MoonMath.ai team reports it beats AITER v3, AMD’s own optimized kernel, on every tested shape. Bare-metal access came from HotAisle, an AMD cloud provider. Attention is the fused softmax(QKᵀ/√d)·V operation inside every transformer. The MI300X is AMD’s CDNA3 data-center GPU, with the ISA targe

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A team has released open-source code that performs a core AI computation called attention more efficiently on AMD's MI300X graphics processor. The code, written in HIP programming language rather than lower-level assembly, consistently outperforms AMD's own optimized version across all tested configurations and rounding modes. The speedup comes primarily from careful memory placement: storing certain data structures in different cache levels and registers to minimize data movement between fast and slow storage. The kernel has already been used in real applications, improving video diffusion generation speed by 1.23 times on MI300X hardware with no quality loss.

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Google Unveils TPU 8i Max and TPU 8tx: A Dual-Chip TPU and a Confidential TPU

Google has added two new systems to its eighth-generation TPU lineup. TPU 8i Max targets massive context windows and rack density. TPU 8tx targets secure, confidential inference. Google TPU 8i Max is a dual-chip package built from 2 TPU 8i chips. Both arrive alongside TPU 8t and TPU 8i, announced in April. TL;DR Size: TPU 8i Max = 2 TPU 8i chips in 1 package. TPU 8tx = TPU 8t silicon plus 5th Gen AMD EPYC hosts. Runs on: Google Cloud TPU systems. Performance: 8i Max doubles TPU 8

Also reported by Data Center Knowledge

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IBM Announces IBM Quantum Nighthawk r3: A New Processor to Support 10k Quantum Operations on 520 Programmable Qubits

IBM has announced IBM Quantum Nighthawk r3, its next superconducting quantum processor. It is designed to run 10,000 quantum operations accurately across 520 programmable qubits. In 2027, IBM plans to link 2 r3 chips into a single 1,040-qubit system. For developers, the announcement is speed. The current Nighthawk r2 already runs workloads up to 19x faster than IBM’s earlier processors. TL;DR Size: Nighthawk r3: 520 programmable qubits, 2,034 physical qubits, 10 l-couplers. Nightha

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Why the data center you dread might never even be built

The data center boom is running into serious real-world obstacles, from widespread local opposition and permitting delays to a scramble for electricity. Before those challenges even come into play, though, there’s a more basic problem: A lot of the projects being announced may never get built in the first place. With billions of dollars in AI infrastructure […]

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How backlash and red tape continue to slow data centers post-Blue Wave

The data center boom is running into serious real-world obstacles, from widespread local opposition and permitting delays to a scramble for electricity. Before those challenges even come into play, though, there’s a more basic problem: A lot of the projects being announced may never get built in the first place. With billions of dollars in AI infrastructure […]

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AMD Launches Epyc SP7, Helion as AI Rack Demand Rises

AMD has begun shipping sixth-gen Epyc servers and is rolling out Helion AI racks, signaling a bigger push into enterprise and agentic AI infrastructure.

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Google broadens its AI hardware portfolio with two new specialized chips

Google's new tensor processing units (TPUs) broaden its chip portfolio to more use cases: confidential model training and more memory capacity.