Introducing the AMD Pensando™ Vulcano 800 AI NIC

1. Based on AMD Engineering silicon modeling and AMD synthetic benchmark simulation, using the MOE_4p5T hi_sparsity_ea9 benchmark test to project time- to- solution speed up in days using the FP8 training datatype on a simulated LLM system modeled with 8000 AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs and (3) versus (2) AMD Pensando Vulcano NICs.

Results reflect analysis of pure training compute (decode layers only) Configuration evaluated with a global batch size of 4096 and a sequence length of 4K, using SwiGLU activation. Results exclude evaluation and checkpointing overhead. FlashAttention v3 with matmul–softmax overlap is assumed. AllReduce and All2All communication costs are fully accounted for and not hidden via tiled compute–communication overlap. Gradient synchronization and FSDP weight prefetch are evaluated across varying levels of overlap to assess scale-out sensitivity. Results assume ideal and not fully optimized real-world behavior and may vary when actual product(s) are released in market MI400-018

2. PEN-022: AMD comparison and pricing as of May 18, 2026, for network fabric costs to support 32,000 GPUs. Comparison of a Vulcano-based NIC (VULCANO-CUSTOM-2.4T) deployed as part of a Helios rackscale system with a network based on 1.6T Tomahawk 6 switching with 200G SerDes versus using a competitor 800G NIC with 800G Tomahawk 6 switching with 100G SerDes. Both fabrics were fat-tree topologies built on Tomahawk 5 800G switching platforms, with NIC costs considered comparable. The Vulcano-based design is estimated to deliver up to 33% savings in network switching costs by enabling a more cost-effective architecture with fewer switching platforms, more bandwidth per port on the network, and reduced transceiver cables/optics.

TH6-100G Serdes Fat-Tree (Competition):
Switching (TH6C BCM78914 - 128x800G):

• Leaf Units 1,000
• Spine Units 500
• Total Switches 1,500
• TH6 100G Unit Price $79,587
• Total Switching Cost $60M

Cables/Optics:

• NIC Transceivers (800G-DR8) 64,000 @ $500
• Leaf/Spine Transceivers (800G-DR8) 192,000 @ $500
• MPO Cables 256,000 @ $89
• Total Optics/Cables $64M

Total Fabric Cost TH6-100G (Switches + Cables/Optics): $124M

TH6-200G Serdes Fat-Tree (Vulcano-Custom2.4T / AMD Solution):
Switching (TH6P BCM78910 - 64x1.6T):

• Leaf Units 1,000
• Spine Units 500
• Total Switches 1,500
• TH6 200G Unit Price $66,336
• Total Switching Cost $50M

Cables/Optics:
NIC Transceivers (1.6T-DR8) 32,000 @ $900 (50% fewer vs. competition)
Leaf/Spine Transceivers (1.6T-DR8) 64,000 @ $900
MPO Cables 128,000 @ $89 (50% fewer vs. competition)
Total Optics/Cables $43M
Total Fabric Cost TH6-200G (Switches + Cables/Optics): $93M

Capex Savings (Fabric only):
Savings $: $30.7M
Savings %: 33.1%

Pricing sources: SemiAnalysis Hyperscaler Networking Model data used with permission; full analysis available via SemiAnalysis subscription. Edgecore switch pricing as of May 17, 2026. Results may vary based on system configuration