While AMD hasn't launched its upcoming Instinct MI400 series of accelerators yet, the company has started preparing its supply chain for what comes after. Thanks to SemiAnalysis, we have a clearer picture of what AMD's Instinct MI500 UAL256 rack will look like. At the base of each compute node, there will be a single "Verano" CPU paired with four Instinct MI500 accelerators. With up to 64 nodes, split across two 32-node racks, AMD plans to enable 256 logical GPUs and 64 CPUs per mega pod, working in tandem for advanced AI and HPC workloads. Instinct MI500s UAL256 will be AMD's second-generation rack-scale system, following the upcoming Instinct MI450X IF128 aka "Helios", scheduled for the second half of 2026. The Instinct MI500 UAL256 scale-up mega pod is scheduled to arrive in 2027, just in time for Verano and Instinct MI500 accelerator.

The Instinct MI500 UAL256 scale-up mega pod splits the compute into two 32-rack cabinets, with a single central rack connecting them and hosting 18 switching trays for networking. Each of these networking trays contains four 102.4T "Vulcano" switch ASICs, designed for 800G external throughput, and manufactured on TSMC's 3 nm node. For the central processor, AMD showed few details at its Advancing AI event, which claimed that Verano introduces the "Zen 7" microarchitecture for even higher IPC and support for even newer instruction sets. For now, it's not clear if AMD will increase CPU core counts beyond the up to 256 cores per package of "Venice." Still, we're hearing that Verano will retain the Socket SP7 infrastructure, which means it will likely retain the memory and PCIe interfaces introduced in 2026, such as PCIe Gen 6, UALink, and Ultra Ethernet.

AMD's "Vega" graphics architecture powering graphics cards such as the Radeon VII, Radeon PRO VII, sees a discontinuation of maintenance with ROCm GPU programming software stack. The release notes of ROCm 5.6 states that the AMD Instinct MI50 accelerator, Radeon VII client graphics card, and Radeon PRO VII pro-vis graphics card, collectively referred to as "gfx906," will reach EOM (end of maintenance) starting Q3-2023, which aligns with the release of ROCm 5.7. Developer "EwoutH" on GitHub, who discovered this, remarks gfx906 is barely 5 years old, with the Radeon PRO VII and Instinct MI50 accelerator currently being sold in the market. The most recent AMD product powered by "Vega" has to be the "Cezanne" desktop processor, which uses an iGPU based on the architecture. This chip was released in Q2-2021.

AMD today announced the AMD Radeon Instinct MI60 and MI50 accelerators, the world's first 7nm datacenter GPUs, designed to deliver the compute performance required for next-generation deep learning, HPC, cloud computing and rendering applications. Researchers, scientists and developers will use AMD Radeon Instinct accelerators to solve tough and interesting challenges, including large-scale simulations, climate change, computational biology, disease prevention and more.

"Legacy GPU architectures limit IT managers from effectively addressing the constantly evolving demands of processing and analyzing huge datasets for modern cloud datacenter workloads," said David Wang, senior vice president of engineering, Radeon Technologies Group at AMD. "Combining world-class performance and a flexible architecture with a robust software platform and the industry's leading-edge ROCm open software ecosystem, the new AMD Radeon Instinct accelerators provide the critical components needed to solve the most difficult cloud computing challenges today and into the future."