AMD Instinct MI500

The AMD Instinct MI500 Series is AMD's next generation of data center accelerators, previewed by Dr. Lisa Su at CES 2026 and planned to launch in 2027. It is the successor to the MI400 Series that ships through 2026 and 2027 as the MI455X, MI440X and MI430X. AMD has disclosed three things about the silicon. It is built on a new architecture, CDNA 6, the sixth generation of AMD's data center compute design and the successor to the CDNA 5 architecture used across the MI400 line. It is manufactured on an advanced 2nm process, a full node beyond the mix of 2nm and 3nm chiplets used in the MI455X. And it uses HBM4E memory, a step beyond the HBM4 introduced with the MI400 Series. AMD has also placed it in its rack roadmap: MI500 Series GPUs will power the Helios 500 rack-scale system alongside EPYC "Verano" processors and Pensando "Como" and "Monza" networking, and AMD has already named the generation after it, the MI600 Series in a Helios 600 rack. Beyond those attributes AMD has published nothing. There is no announced capacity, bandwidth, board power, chiplet configuration, clock speed, transistor count or throughput figure at any precision, and there is no MI500 datasheet or product page. AMD's only performance statement is that the MI500 Series is on track to deliver up to a thousandfold increase in AI performance over the MI300X GPUs of 2023. That claim deserves care: AMD's own endnote defines it as a comparison between an MI500-powered AI rack and an MI300X platform, based on engineering projections made in December 2025, and it names no precision on either side. It compares a rack to a platform, over a period in which AMD added FP8, FP6 and FP4 datapaths that the MI300X never had, so it cannot be reduced to a per-accelerator number and no performance data is recorded here. Individual MI500 SKUs, and the specifications that come with them, are expected to be named closer to launch.