AMD at its Advancing AI Day event in San Jose announced the Instinct MI350X and MI355X accelerators. Exciting open-source fans will be that the Instinct MI350 series features fully open-source driver support and that is already mainline within the Linux kernel.
The AMD Instinct MI350 series with its CDNA4 architecture is an evolutionary improvement over the MI300 series but aims to be much more competitive, especially for AI/ML workloads. As much as a 35x generational improvement for AI workloads. The AMD Instinct MI355X provides up to 40% more tokens per dollar compared to the NVIDIA GB200 competition.
The AMD Instinct MI350X is applicable for air cooling while the higher-end Instinct MI355X will is designed for direct liquid cooling and able to accommodate higher density deployments.
You’ll likely have seen Lisa Su’s presentation by now and the plethora of articles on many websites around the Instinct MI350 series around the hardware/specifications itself… At Phoronix what excites us the most — and where we provide our value/focus — is the continued open-source support.
The AMD Instinct MI350 series is the GFX950 target already upstream in the AMDGPU LLVM back-end. The various IP blocks comprising the Instinct MI350 series is also already upstream for the AMDKFD and AMDGPU kernel drivers. Upstream kernel support for the Instinct MI350 series on launch day. The ROCm packages are building from that upstream state.
The one bit not public yet is the firmware files for the Instinct MI350 series hardware, but I’m told they should be hitting the linux-firmware.git repository today or perhaps already with having written this article in advance under embargo.
Prior Instinct accelerators — and AMD GPUs at large — have enjoyed open-source driver support but now for the Instinct MI350X/MI355X launch it is much more polished and in a stable/released kernel ahead of the formal production introduction.
Should have started a counter for how many times @AMD @LisaSu mentions #opensource today 😁 pic.twitter.com/m8J5dPeVHu
— Phoronix (@) June 12, 2025
The kernel driver support is all open-source and upstream in Linux. Base support is in Linux 6.14 and with additional features and enablement work in the stable Linux 6.15 kernel. And then for user-space the new ROCm preview is being published today for that initial Instinct MI350 series support with their open-source compute stack.
It’s excellent seeing the upstream kernel support all settled ahead of time for the AMD Instinct MI350 series and hopefully we’ll be able to test the Instinct MI355X soon in the cloud.
