Following Vultr’s recent announcement of AMD Instinct™ MI355X GPU availability, Vultr CMO Kevin Cochrane joined AMD AI Business Development Manager Aleks Shargorodskiy in a joint webinar “The Smart Money on AI: Why AMD and Vultr Deliver More for Less.”
Cochrane and Shargorodskiy talked about the innovative features of the entire AMD Instinct™ GPU lineup (especially the MI355X), AMD’s ROCm™ open-source software, and the importance of users running their own benchmark tests to discover the price-to-performance advantages of AMD GPUs on Vultr.
Watch the full conversation between the two experts to learn more about how AMD and Vultr help enterprises, innovators, and developers get the most out of their AI. View “The Smart Money on AI: Why AMD and Vultr Deliver More for Less.”
Changing AI and tech stack priorities
Cochrane highlighted a fundamental shift in the marketplace around compute and AI technologies: A market that was once geared toward startups whose top priority was time-to-market, with a sole focus on sheer performance, has evolved. Now, it’s shifted to the enterprise, with a focus on new agentic AI initiatives and scale-out architectures that necessitate not just performance, but also cost-efficiency. “This is where price-to-performance truly matters,” Cochrane said.
Shargorodskiy talked about the three phases of AI innovation: building a product, making it work, and making it work fast. The two experts agree that the industry is in that final phase, where rapid and cost-effective deployment is critical.
That’s where AMD GPUs on Vultr excel, and the cutting-edge AMD Instinct MI355X is another chapter.
“This is a race. And it is a marathon,” Cochrane said about AI infrastructure. “Consistent relentless execution against a roadmap to help enterprises re-envision their mission-critical compute infrastructure truly matters.”
Open-ecosystem innovation and flexibility with ROCm™
One key feature of the AMD Instinct MI355X GPU, and the entire AMD Instinct series, is its compatibility with ROCm architecture, which provides flexibility and performance suitable for use cases across industries.
That adaptability is a key part of AMD and Vultr’s mission: building open-source, open-ecosystem AI infrastructure that, Shargorodskiy said, enables users to innovate in tandem with AMD.
“AMD is bringing the power of open-source to the community with ROCm 7,” Cochrane said, adding that this open ecosystem also drives down cost. “In the history of compute, open-source is always the key to long-term innovation.”
The experts highlighted that AMD innovates its ROCm architecture every six weeks, enabling new development opportunities — but that doesn’t render older generations of GPUs obsolete: ROCm 7 optimizes MI300X and MI325X GPUs as well.
As a pioneer in composable infrastructure and a champion of silicon diversity, Vultr enables users to spin up heterogeneous clusters that mix the MI355X with older GPUs to meet enterprises’ specific AI stack demands.
The power of benchmarking
Don’t just take their word for it: Throughout, Cochrane and Shargorodskiy implored viewers and the entire developer community to run their own benchmarking and witness the standout price-to-performance advantages of the MI355X for themselves. Now that the go-to-market rush has subsided in favor of efficiency, it’s important to build, test, and optimize — instead of just building and deploying.
There’s no one-size-fits-all rule with GPU technology. AMD works with users to understand their specific use cases and needs, advising them and helping orchestrate their optimized stack. Vultr is focused on helping customers unlock value, including with industry-specific verticals that can uncover an entire stack of tailored services to optimize applications at global scale. Deployment can take seconds: It’s as easy as logging in on Vultr.com and spinning up a cluster.
Cochrane emphasized that the number of AI engineers building and deploying AI applications today pales in comparison to that number just two, three, four years down the line. Developers need to re-tool and build new skills around AI.
AMD and Vultr are ensuring that they’re equipped to do so, and to develop skillsets that will last.
“AMD Instinct is the biggest secret in the entire compute industry,” Cochrane said. “This is a game changer, and every single enterprise should test the MI355X to actually see the price-performance advantage it can yield.”
For the full conversation, watch “The Smart Money on AI: Why AMD and Vultr Deliver More for Less."