Red Hat and AMD power leading-edge AI inference performance with vLLM on AMD Instinct™ GPUs
Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on AMD EPYC™ CPUs helps organizations more easily modernize existing systems for future innovations

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, and AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) today announced a strategic collaboration to propel AI capabilities and optimize virtualized infrastructure. With this deepened alliance, Red Hat and AMD will expand customer choice across the hybrid cloud, from deploying optimized, efficient AI models to more cost-effectively modernizing traditional virtual machines (VMs).

As workload demand and diversity continue to rise with the introduction of AI, organizations must have the capacity and resources to meet these escalating requirements. The average datacenter, however, is dedicated primarily to traditional IT systems, leaving little room to support intensive workloads such as AI. To answer this need, Red Hat and AMD are bringing together the power of Red Hat's industry-leading open source solutions with the comprehensive portfolio of AMD high-performance computing architectures.

AMD and Red Hat: Driving to more efficient generative AI

Red Hat and AMD are combining the power of Red Hat AI with the AMD portfolio of x86-based processors and GPU architectures to support optimized, cost-efficient and production-ready environments for AI-enabled workloads.

AMD Instinct GPUs are now fully enabled on Red Hat OpenShift AI, empowering customers with the high-performing processing power necessary for AI deployments across the hybrid cloud without extreme resource requirements. In addition, using AMD Instinct MI300X GPUs with Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI, Red Hat and AMD conducted testing on Microsoft Azure ND MI300X v5 to successfully demonstrate AI inferencing for scaling small language models (SLMs) as well as large language models (LLM) deployed across multiple GPUs on a single VM, reducing the need to deploy across multiple VMs and reducing performance costs.

To drive further performance acceleration and tuning capabilities, Red Hat and AMD are collaborating in the upstream vLLM community to foster more efficient AI inference. With this upstream activation, Red Hat and AMD aim to deliver:

Improved performance on AMD GPUs: By upstreaming the AMD kernel library and optimizing various components like the Triton kernel and FP8, Red Hat and AMD are advancing inference performance for both dense and quantized models, enabling faster and more efficient execution of vLLM on AMD Instinct MI300X accelerators.
Enhanced multi-GPU support: Improving collective communication and optimizing multi-GPU workloads opens the door to more scalable and energy-efficient AI deployments, which is particularly beneficial for workloads that require distributed computing across multiple GPUs, reducing bottlenecks and improving overall throughput.
Expanded vLLM ecosystem engagement: Cross-collaboration between Red Hat, AMD and other industry leaders like IBM helps accelerate upstream development to propel continuous improvements for both the vLLM project and AMD GPU optimization, further benefiting vLLM users that rely on AMD hardware for AI inference and training.

Building upon this collaboration in the vLLM community, AMD Instinct GPUs will support Red Hat AI Inference Server, Red Hat's enterprise-grade distribution of vLLM, out-of-the-box for a powerful, reliable and scalable AI inference server. As the top commercial contributor to vLLM, Red Hat is committed to enabling compatibility when deploying vLLM on an organization's hardware of choice, which includes AMD Instinct GPUs. Running vLLM on AMD Instinct GPUs empowers organizations to deploy any open source AI model on validated, tested GPU hardware for outstanding optimization and performance.

AMD EPYC™ CPUs also enable end-to-end AI performance and are ideal to host GPU-enabled systems. This can help improve the performance and return on investment (ROI) of each GPU server for even the most demanding of AI workloads.

Transforming the modern datacenter

By optimizing existing datacenter footprints, organizations can more effectively and easily reinvest resources to enable AI innovation. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, a feature of Red Hat OpenShift, offers a streamlined path for organizations to migrate and manage VM workloads with the simplicity and speed of a cloud-native application platform. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is validated for AMD EPYC processors capable of leveraging the AMD EPYC processors' excellent performance and power efficiency, wherever needed on the hybrid cloud, while maintaining a bridge to a cloud-native future.

Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on AMD EPYC CPUs helps enterprises optimize application deployment on leading servers, such as Dell PowerEdge, HPE ProLiant and Lenovo ThinkSystem products. When refreshing a legacy datacenter, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization provides for the unification of VMs and containerized applications, on-premise, in public clouds or across the hybrid cloud. This helps enable high infrastructure consolidation ratios that can lead to significantly lower total cost of ownership (TCO) on hardware, software licensing and energy dimensions. This has the added benefit of enabling IT teams to more effectively manage critical workloads today while freeing resources and energy to apply to AI workloads now and in the future.

Red Hat Summit

Join the Red Hat Summit keynotes to hear the latest from Red Hat executives, customers and partners:

Modernized infrastructure meets enterprise-ready AI — Tuesday, May 20, 8-10 a.m. EDT (YouTube)
Hybrid cloud evolves to deliver enterprise innovation — Wednesday, May 21, 8-9:30 a.m. EDT (YouTube)

Supporting Quotes

Ashesh Badani, senior vice president and chief product officer, Red Hat

"Fully realizing the benefits of AI means that organizations must have the choice and flexibility to optimize their IT footprint for the rigors of scaling demand. Our extended collaboration with AMD expands the spectrum of options for organizations seeking to ready their IT environments for an ever-evolving future, from modernizing existing investments on a high-performing CPU architecture and virtualization platform to preparing for production AI with next-generation hardware accelerators and open source AI technologies."

Philip Guido, executive vice president and chief commercial officer, AMD

"As enterprise customer workloads grow more diverse and demanding, they require solutions that can scale. By combining Red Hat's industry-leading open source platforms with world-class AMD Instinct GPUs and AMD EPYC CPUs, we're delivering the performance and efficiency customers demand to accelerate AI, virtualization and hybrid-cloud innovation."

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About AMD

For more than 50 years AMD has driven innovation in high-performance computing, graphics, and visualization technologies. Billions of people, leading Fortune 500 businesses, and cutting-edge scientific research institutions around the world rely on AMD technology daily to improve how they live, work, and play. AMD employees are focused on building leadership high-performance and adaptive products that push the boundaries of what is possible. For more information about how AMD is enabling today and inspiring tomorrow, visit the AMD (NASDAQ:AMD) website, blog, LinkedIn and X pages.

About Red Hat

Red Hat is the open hybrid cloud technology leader, delivering a trusted, consistent and comprehensive foundation for transformative IT innovation and AI applications. Its portfolio of cloud, developer, AI, Linux, automation and application platform technologies enables any application, anywhere—from the datacenter to the edge. As the world's leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, Red Hat invests in open ecosystems and communities to solve tomorrow's IT challenges. Collaborating with partners and customers, Red Hat helps them build, connect, automate, secure and manage their IT environments, supported by consulting services and award-winning training and certification offerings.

Forward-Looking Statements

Except for the historical information and discussions contained herein, statements contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are based on the company's current assumptions regarding future business and financial performance. These statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statement in this press release speaks only as of the date on which it is made. Except as required by law, the company assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.

Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Red Hat logo and OpenShift are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries.

AMD, the AMD logo, EPYC, AMD Instinct, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250520085545/en/

Media Contact:

Jessie Beach, Red Hat

+1 (919) 602-2836

jbeach@redhat.com

Aaron Grabein, AMD

+1 (737) 256-9518

Aaron.Grabein@amd.com

Red Hat and AMD Strengthen Strategic Collaboration, Expand Customer Choice for AI and Virtualization Across the Hybrid Cloud