VOOZH about

URL: https://willitrunai.com/gpus/instinct-mi250x-128gb

⇱ AI Models for AMD Instinct MI250X 128GB — What Runs on 128GB VRAM


AMD

AMD Instinct MI250X 128GB

InstinctDatacenterCDNA 2OAMROCm

Operating mode

Choose the operating mode for this hardware

Use this to bias workload recommendations toward responsiveness, background autonomy, lighter serving, or multi-GPU scale-out.

Current mode

Balanced

Balanced for general local use. Keeps the ranking neutral across personal and serving workflows.

See Full AI Tier List for AMD Instinct MI250X 128GB →

About this GPU for AI

The AMD Instinct MI250X 128GB is the higher-tier CDNA 2 OAM accelerator, featuring the same 128 GB HBM2e as the MI250 but with higher compute throughput (383 vs 362 TFLOPS FP16). It was AMD's primary competitor to the NVIDIA A100 80GB and was widely deployed in HPC clusters. Full ROCm support makes it a production-ready platform for LLM inference, though it has been superseded by the MI300X for new deployments.

Beyond LLMs

AI Capability Matrix

What AI tasks this GPU can handle — from text generation to image and video creation.

CapabilityStatusRepresentative ModelDetail
LLM Chat (7B)Runs nativelyLlama 3.1 8B Q4
LLM Coding (30B)Runs nativelyQwen 3 30B Q4
LLM Large (70B)
rocm-supporteddatacenter-gradehigh-bandwidthhigh-vram

Specifications

Compute
FP16383 TFLOPS
INT8766 TOPS
ArchitectureCDNA 2
Memory
VRAM128 GB
Bandwidth3200 GB/s
General
FamilyInstinct
SegmentDatacenter
InterconnectOAM
Compute PlatformROCM
MSRP$15,000

Key Features

CDNA 2 architecture (dual-die GCD, OAM form factor, fully enabled)128 GB HBM2e across two dies3.2 TB/s aggregate memory bandwidth440 Compute Units with second-generation Matrix CoresAMD Infinity Fabric + xGMI interconnect for multi-card scalingFull ROCm support — production LLM inference platform

For AI Workloads

Strengths
  • 128 GB HBM2e for 70B FP16 and 405B Q4 inference
  • 383 TFLOPS FP16 is higher than MI250 — better for compute-bound workloads
  • 3.2 TB/s bandwidth delivers fast generation for large model sizes
  • Mature ROCm support — widely deployed and well-tested in production
Considerations
  • OAM requires specialized server/OCP rack infrastructure
  • MI300X offers 1307 TFLOPS — over 3x more compute at reduced cost per TFLOP
  • CDNA 2 lacks INT8/FP8 hardware acceleration in CDNA 3+
  • Legacy product — AMD is phasing it out in favor of MI300 series

Architecture

CDNA 2

CDNA 2 powers the Instinct MI210 and MI250/MI250X accelerators. It introduced multi-die packaging with up to 128 GB HBM2e and Infinity Fabric for die-to-die communication.

AI Relevance

With up to 128 GB HBM2e memory and strong ROCm support, CDNA 2 GPUs can host large language models. The MI250X was used in the Frontier exascale supercomputer and supports major AI frameworks.

Process: TSMC 6nmPlatform: ROCMPrecisions: FP64, FP32, TF32, FP16, BF16, INT8

Recommendations by Workload

Chat

S

Qwen 3.5 122B A10B

Qwen 3.5 122B A10B matches Chat and keeps a practical fit profile. It is a recent-generation family, which helps on current local SOTA workloads. It fits natively with comfortable headroom. Context coverage stays within the requested workload envelope. Known distribution channels: huggingface, lm-studio.

Decode 100.3 tok/s · 131K ctx · llama.cppEST.
89.3 GB / 128.0 GB VRAM

Coding

S

Qwen3-Coder-Next

Qwen3-Coder-Next is a specialized fit for Coding. It is a recent-generation family, which helps on current local SOTA workloads. It fits natively with comfortable headroom. Context coverage stays within the requested workload envelope. Known distribution channels: huggingface, ollama, lm-studio.

Decode 105.7 tok/s · 256K ctx · llama.cppEST.
100.8 GB / 128.0 GB VRAM

Agentic Coding

Full Model Compatibility

👁 Alibaba
Qwen 3.5 122B A10B
S99
122B90.6 GB100 tok/s131K ctx
moe
👁 Mistral
Mistral Small 4 119B
S97
119B91.7 GB109 tok/s124K ctx
moe
👁 Mistral
Devstral 2 123B Instruct
S

Just out of reach

Models you could run with an upgrade

High-quality models that need a bit more memory

Image & Video Generation

Diffusion Model Compatibility

52 of 52 models can generate images or video on your AMD Instinct MI250X 128GB

ModelMax ResolutionGen TimeGrade
SD TurboImage512×512100msS
Stable Diffusion 1.5Image512×768200msS
Realistic Vision v5.1Image512×768200msS
DreamShaper 8Image512×768200msS
LCM DreamShaper v7

Multi-GPU scaling

AMD Instinct MI250X 128GB — Up to 4× via Infinity Fabric

Scale out with multiple GPUs for larger models. Infinity Fabric provides 800 GB/s inter-GPU bandwidth with 15% overhead.

ConfigEffective memoryModels that fitEst. bandwidth
1× AMD128 GB351/3743,200 GB/s
2× AMD256 GB363/3745,440 GB/s
4× AMD512 GB371/37410,880 GB/s

Model counts use default quantization at coding workload settings. Multi-GPU scaling factor: 0.85× per additional GPU.

Upgrade paths

Upgrade from AMD Instinct MI250X 128GB

See what you unlock with more powerful hardware

Upgrade options

Upgrade options

4× AMD Instinct MI250X 128GBMulti-GPU
4 × 128 GB = 512 GB effectivevia Infinity Fabric (800 GB/s)
A
Unlocks 20 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.Unlocks Qwen 3.5 397B A17B, DeepSeek V4 Flash, GLM-5.1+17 more · +62% faster avg

Unlocks 20 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.

Lifts average decode speed across fitting models by about 62%.

Infinity Fabric gives this scale-out path a cleaner inter-GPU story than PCIe-only builds.

~$15,000 MSRP

👁 NVIDIA
NVIDIA H200 141GBNext step up
141 GB VRAM (+13)4800 GB/s (+1600)
B
Unlocks 2 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.Unlocks Qwen 3 235B A22B, MiniMax M2.7+22% faster avg

Unlocks 2 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.

Lifts average decode speed across fitting models by about 22%.

~$30,000 MSRP

👁 NVIDIA
NVIDIA B200 180GBBiggest leap
180 GB VRAM (+52)8000 GB/s (+4800)
B
Unlocks 8 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.Unlocks DeepSeek V4 Flash, Qwen 3 235B A22B, MiniMax M2.7+5 more · +49% faster avg

Unlocks 8 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.

Lifts average decode speed across fitting models by about 49%.

~$30,000 MSRP

AMD Instinct MI325X 256GBAMD upgrade
256 GB VRAM (+128)6000 GB/s (+2800)
B
Unlocks 12 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.Unlocks Qwen 3.5 397B A17B, DeepSeek V4 Flash, Qwen 3 235B A22B+9 more · +24% faster avg

Unlocks 12 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.

Lifts average decode speed across fitting models by about 24%.

~$20,000 MSRP

AMD Instinct MI350X 288GBBest value
288 GB VRAM (+160)8000 GB/s (+4800)
B
Unlocks 13 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.Unlocks Qwen 3.5 397B A17B, DeepSeek V4 Flash, Qwen 3 235B A22B+10 more · +40% faster avg

Unlocks 13 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.

Lifts average decode speed across fitting models by about 40%.

~$8,000 MSRP

Frequently Asked Questions

Compare with similar

AMD Instinct MI250X 128GB vs AMD Instinct MI300A 128GBAMD Instinct MI250X 128GB vs Intel Data Center GPU Max 1550 128GBAMD Instinct MI250X 128GB vs AMD Instinct MI250 128GB
Compare this GPUCompare with another GPU →
128GB
VRAM
3.2kGB/s
Bandwidth
383TFLOPS
FP16 Compute
766TOPS
INT8 Inference
$15,000 MSRP
AMD Instinct MI250X 128GBCategory AvgNVIDIA H200 141GB
Runs natively
Llama 3.1 70B Q4
Image Gen (SDXL)Runs nativelySDXL 1.0 FP16~800ms per image
Image Gen (Flux)Runs nativelyFlux.1 Dev FP16~~3.8s per image
Image Gen (SD 3.5)Runs nativelySD 3.5 Large FP16~~4.6s per image
Video Short (25f)Runs nativelyLTX Video 2B~700ms/frame
Video Long (100f)Runs nativelyWan Video 14B~~2.1s/frame
S

Devstral 2 123B Instruct

Devstral 2 123B Instruct is a specialized fit for Agentic Coding. It is a recent-generation family, which helps on current local SOTA workloads. It fits natively with comfortable headroom. Context coverage stays within the requested workload envelope. Known distribution channels: huggingface, lm-studio.

Decode 36.2 tok/s · 117K ctx · llama.cppEST.
99.5 GB / 128.0 GB VRAM

Reasoning

S

Devstral 2 123B Instruct

Devstral 2 123B Instruct matches Reasoning and keeps a practical fit profile. It is a recent-generation family, which helps on current local SOTA workloads. It fits natively with comfortable headroom. Context coverage stays within the requested workload envelope. Known distribution channels: huggingface, lm-studio.

Decode 36.2 tok/s · 117K ctx · llama.cppEST.
94.1 GB / 128.0 GB VRAM

RAG

S

Qwen 3.5 122B A10B

Qwen 3.5 122B A10B matches RAG and keeps a practical fit profile. It is a recent-generation family, which helps on current local SOTA workloads. It fits natively with comfortable headroom. Context coverage stays within the requested workload envelope. Known distribution channels: huggingface, lm-studio.

Decode 100.3 tok/s · 131K ctx · llama.cppEST.
93.0 GB / 128.0 GB VRAM
97
123B94.1 GB36 tok/s117K ctx
dense
👁 OpenAI
GPT-OSS 120B
S94
117B90.0 GB38 tok/s131K ctx
dense
👁 Cohere
Command A 111B
S94
111B85.3 GB40 tok/s191K ctx
dense
👁 Mistral AI
Pixtral Large 124B
S93
124B94.7 GB36 tok/s115K ctx
dense
👁 Mistral
Leanstral 119B A6B
S93
119B95.1 GB100 tok/s76K ctx
moe
👁 Alibaba
Qwen3-Coder-Next
S92
80B64.0 GB169 tok/s256K ctx
moe
👁 Alibaba
Qwen 2.5 VL 72B
S92
72B62.5 GB62 tok/s33K ctx
dense
👁 Alibaba
Qwen 3.6 35B A3B
S91
35B39.2 GB317 tok/s262K ctx
+1moe
👁 Alibaba
Qwen3-Coder 30B A3B Instruct
S91
30.5B33.8 GB377 tok/s256K ctx
moe
👁 Alibaba
Qwen 3.5 27B
S90
27B33.3 GB164 tok/s131K ctx
dense
👁 Alibaba
Qwen3-VL 30B A3B Instruct
S90
30B33.5 GB390 tok/s256K ctx
moe
👁 Alibaba
Qwen 3.5 35B A3B
S90
35B36.5 GB345 tok/s131K ctx
moe
👁 Alibaba
Qwen 3.6 27B
S90
27B31.1 GB102 tok/s262K ctx
+1dense
👁 Alibaba
Qwen 3 32B
S89
32B37.1 GB139 tok/s131K ctx
dense
👁 Mistral
Magistral Small 2507
S88
24B30.8 GB183 tok/s131K ctx
dense
👁 Mistral
Devstral Small 2 24B Instruct
S88
24B30.8 GB183 tok/s256K ctx
dense
👁 Alibaba
Qwen 3 30B A3B
S88
30.5B33.8 GB377 tok/s131K ctx
moe
👁 NVIDIA
Nemotron 3 Nano 30B
S88
30B34.4 GB147 tok/s131K ctx
dense
👁 Alibaba
Qwen 3.5 9B
S87
9B21.4 GB126 tok/s131K ctx
dense
👁 Alibaba
Qwen 3 14B
S87
14B24.7 GB196 tok/s131K ctx
dense
👁 Mistral
Devstral Small 1.1
S87
24B30.8 GB183 tok/s131K ctx
dense
👁 Google
Gemma 4 31B
S86
30.7B47.1 GB87 tok/s104K ctx
dense
👁 Microsoft
Phi-4-reasoning-plus 14B
S86
14.7B25.7 GB206 tok/s33K ctx
dense
👁 NVIDIA
Nemotron Cascade 2 30B A3B
S85
30B34.9 GB386 tok/s262K ctx
moe
👁 Alibaba
Qwen 3 8B
S85
8B20.8 GB112 tok/s131K ctx
dense
👁 OpenAI
GPT-OSS 20B
S85
21B29.0 GB479 tok/s128K ctx
moe
👁 Alibaba
Qwen 3.5 4B
A83
4B18.3 GB56 tok/s131K ctx
dense
👁 LG AI
EXAONE 4.0 32B
A83
32B37.1 GB138 tok/s131K ctx
dense
👁 Google
Gemma 4 26B A4B
A82
25.2B32.7 GB405 tok/s256K ctx
moe
👁 Mistral
Ministral 3 14B
A81
14B24.7 GB196 tok/s262K ctx
multimodal
👁 NVIDIA
Nemotron Nano 8B
A80
8B20.5 GB112 tok/s131K ctx
dense
👁 Microsoft
Phi-4 Mini Reasoning 4B
A80
3.8B17.5 GB53 tok/s131K ctx
dense
👁 Jina AI
Jina Embeddings v3
A74
0.57B16.8 GB8 tok/s8K ctx
dense
👁 BAAI
BGE M3
A73
0.57B16.0 GB8 tok/s8K ctx
dense
👁 Alibaba
Qwen 3.5 397B A17B
F0
397B258.7 GB6 tok/s4K ctx
moe
👁 Moonshot AI
Kimi K2.5
F0
1000B631.1 GB2 tok/s4K ctx
moe
👁 Moonshot AI
Kimi K2.6
F0
1000B631.1 GB2 tok/s4K ctx
+1moe
👁 DeepSeek
DeepSeek V4 Pro
F0
1600B877.6 GB2 tok/s4K ctx
moe
👁 DeepSeek
DeepSeek V4 Flash
F0
284B173.0 GB21 tok/s4K ctx
moe
👁 Z.ai
GLM-5.1
F0
754B492.7 GB2 tok/s4K ctx
moe
👁 Z.ai
GLM-5
F0
744B486.6 GB2 tok/s4K ctx
moe
👁 DeepSeek
DeepSeek V3.2
F0
671B423.5 GB3 tok/s4K ctx
moe
👁 Alibaba
Qwen 3 235B A22B
F0
235B159.9 GB24 tok/s4K ctx
moe
👁 Alibaba
Qwen3-Coder 480B A35B Instruct
F0
480B309.4 GB4 tok/s4K ctx
moe
MiniMax M2.7
F0
230B157.8 GB28 tok/s4K ctx
moe
👁 DeepSeek
DeepSeek Coder V2 236B
F0
236B216.3 GB12 tok/s4K ctx
moe
👁 DeepSeek
DeepSeek R1 671B
F0
671B482.6 GB3 tok/s4K ctx
moe
👁 DeepSeek
DeepSeek V3.1 671B
F0
671B482.6 GB3 tok/s4K ctx
moe
Image
512×768
100ms
S
PixArt-SigmaImage1024×1024800msS
FramePack I2VVideo1280×720~1.5s/frameS
SDXL TurboImage512×512100msS
SDXL LightningImage1024×1024300msS
Stable Diffusion XL 1.0Image1024×1024800msS
Playground v2.5Image1024×1024~1.3sS
RealVisXL v5.0Image1024×1024900msS
DreamShaper XLImage1024×1024900msS
Juggernaut XL v9Image1024×1024900msS
Animagine XL 3.1Image1024×1024900msS
Pony Diffusion V6 XLImage1024×1024900msS
Animagine XL 4.0Image1024×1024900msS
Illustrious XLImage1024×1024900msS
Wan Video 2.1 1.3BVideo480×832600ms/frameS
Stable Diffusion 3.5 MediumImage1024×1024~1.5sS
Flux.2 Klein 4BImage1024×1024300msS
LTX Video 2BVideo1280×720700ms/frameS
KolorsImage1024×1024~1.7sS
Stable CascadeImage1024×1024~2.1sS
AuraFlow v0.3Image1536×1536~3.8sS
Stable Diffusion 3.5 LargeImage1024×1024~4.6sS
Stable Diffusion 3.5 Large TurboImage1024×1024800msS
CogVideoX 2BVideo720×480700ms/frameS
HunyuanVideoVideo720×1280~1.5s/frameS
ChromaImage1024×1024800msS
Z-Image TurboImage1536×1536900msS
Flux.1 DevImage1024×1024~3.8sS
Flux.1 SchnellImage1024×1024700msS
LTX Video 13BVideo1280×720~1.5s/frameS
Flux.1 Kontext DevImage1024×1024~4.2sS
AnimateDiff v1.5.3Video512×768400ms/frameS
Cosmos Diffusion 7BVideo1024×576~1.2s/frameS
CogVideoX 5BVideo720×480~1s/frameS
Wan2.2 TI2V 5BVideo832×480~1s/frameS
Flux.2 Klein 9BImage1024×1024400msS
Flux.1 Fill DevImage1024×1024~3.5sS
Mochi 1 PreviewVideo848×480~1.4s/frameS
HunyuanVideo 1.5Video720×1280~1.3s/frameS
Helios 14BVideo1280×720~1.6s/frameS
SkyReels V2 14BVideo1280×720~1.6s/frameS
Wan Video 2.1 14BVideo720×1280~1.6s/frameS
Wan Video 2.2 14BVideo720×1280~1.6s/frameS
Qwen ImageImage1024×1024~1.4sS
Qwen Image EditImage1024×1024~1.4sS
Flux.2 DevImage1024×1024~39.5sS
MAGI-1Video1280×720~2s/frameS
HunyuanImage 3.0Image256×256~2.5sD

Image models estimated at 1024×1024 (28 steps, FP16). Video models estimated at 768×512 (25 frames, 30 steps, FP16). Actual performance varies with runtime and system load.

Buying advice

Should you buy AMD Instinct MI250X 128GB for local AI?

Excellent choice for local AI

Runs 36 of 50 top models well — a strong all-rounder for local inference.

128.0 GB

VRAM

$15,000

MSRP

$117/GB

Cost per GB VRAM

Best models for this GPU

What will limit you first

This setup is broadly balanced for this model.

No major red flags

This recommendation has enough memory headroom and acceptable estimated speed for the selected workload.

Best upgrade itinerary

Unlocks 2 additional models that do not fit on the current setup.

Want more headroom? NVIDIA H200 141GB (141.0 GB VRAM) is the next step up.