AMD has a clear-cut business plan: Its upcoming 32-core Zen chip will bring it back into high-performance servers, and the company has expressed a desire to make high-performing GPUs for such systems.
The combination could make for a powerful server and a signature re-entry for AMD into the server market, where it virtually has no presence after bad product decisions cost it market share. The company is already doing the background work so software can be written and installed on those servers.
AMD has released the latest version of software tools, called ROCm, that will make it easy to write and compile parallel programs for its GPUs and CPUs. It’s targeted mainly at high-performance computing applications.
