AMD is firmly asserting its leadership in the high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) landscape, with a bold combination of architectural innovation, energy efficiency, and strategic vision.
At ISC High Performance 2025, AMD’s dominance was on full display as El Capitan and Frontier retained their positions as the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 supercomputers on the prestigious Top500 list, reinforcing the company’s position at the forefront of compute performance and efficiency.
Innovation at Scale
At the heart of AMD’s HPC success is breakthrough innovation. The El Capitan system — powered by AMD’s Instinct MI300A APUs, which combine CPU and GPU cores in a single package — achieved an astonishing 1.742 exaflops on the HPL benchmark. This integrated architecture supports mixed workloads such as simulations, analytics, and AI inference, all within a unified platform. AMD has also debuted at No. 1 on the HPL-MxP benchmark with El Capitan delivering 16.7 exaflops in AI-focused mixed precision computing.
The Frontier system, the world’s first exascale supercomputer, continues to hold strong with 1.353 exaflops of performance, powered by AMD EPYC CPUs and MI250X GPUs, enabling critical breakthroughs across energy, climate modeling, and AI.
Strategic Execution
AMD’s rise is not accidental — it’s the result of a focused strategy to deliver leading compute solutions that span from exascale systems to edge deployments. AMD now powers 172 of the world’s fastest systems, a record 34 percent of the entire Top500 list, with 17 new systems debuting this year alone. Among these are flagship deployments in Europe and academia, including the University of Stuttgart’s Hunter, University of Hull’s Viper, and the Pitagora system hosted by CINECA.
AMD’s product roadmap and architectural decisions — like developing unified APU platforms for HPC and AI — reflect a clear understanding of customer demands and emerging trends in compute workloads.
Energy Efficiency and Sustainability
AMD’s leadership isn’t limited to raw performance — it also leads in energy efficiency, a key metric for sustainable computing. With 12 of the top 20 systems on the Green500 list powered by AMD technologies, including the highly efficient El Capitan and Frontier, AMD is proving that compute leadership and sustainability can go hand in hand.
The El Capitan platform, for instance, not only offers top-tier performance but also ranks among the most energy-efficient large-scale systems — critical as HPC and AI workloads grow more power-intensive.
Customer Impact
For customers — from national labs and universities to enterprises — AMD’s innovations offer substantial benefits:
Performance at scale: Accelerated time to discovery and insight across scientific, defense, and industrial workloads.
Energy and cost efficiency: Lower TCO with unmatched performance-per-watt across CPUs, GPUs, and APUs.
AI readiness: Platforms optimized for both traditional HPC and emerging AI workloads, including large language model (LLM) training and inference.
As Rob Neely of LLNL emphasized, El Capitan delivers on a 15-year vision of exascale performance with confidence, precision, and the ability to transform how simulation and AI workloads support national security.
With continued momentum, a full-stack silicon portfolio, and record-breaking systems, AMD is not just keeping pace — it’s setting the pace for the future of computing. Through relentless innovation, strategic execution, and a commitment to energy-efficient performance, AMD is powering a new era of scientific discovery and AI transformation.
Rajani Baburajan
