AMD Epyc Wins Another; Debuts on AWS

By Doug Black

November 6, 2018

AMD’s mission to add market share in the super-hot datacenter server processor market has taken its Epyc chip into the biggest datacenter of them all, Amazon Web Services, dominant leader in the public cloud services industry. Today at AMD’s Next Horizon conference in San Francisco, AMD and AWS announced the availability of the first AMD Epyc processor-based instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

AMD said the new instances are available as variants of Amazon EC2’s memory optimized and general-purpose instance families. AMD-based R5 and M5 instances can be launched via the AWS Management Console or AWS Command Line Interface and are available today in the US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland) and Asia Pacific regions; availability elsewhere will follow soon.

AMD-based T3 instances will be available in the coming weeks. AMD-based M5 and R5 instances are available in six sizes with up to 96 vCPUs, up to 768 GB of memory. AMD-based T3 instances will be available in 7 sizes with up to 8 vCPUs and 32 GB of memory. The new instances can be purchased as on-demand, reserved, or spot instances on AWS, AMD said.

AMD’s Forrest Norrod in San Francisco with listing of Epyc public cloud deployments

“The availability of multiple AMD Epyc processor-powered instances on Amazon EC2 instances marks a significant milestone in the growing adoption of our high-performance CPUs with cloud service providers,” said Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, Datacenter and Embedded Solutions Business Group, AMD. “The powerful combination of cores, memory bandwidth and I/O on AMD Epyc processors create a highly differentiated solution that can offer lower TCO for our customers and lower prices for the end-user. Working with AWS, the number one provider in cloud services, has been amazing for the AMD team and we are excited to see the new instances come online today for their customers.”

AMD, of course, has been mounting an aggressive price/performance competitive effort to grab business from Intel in the CPU server processor market. Although the latest numbers from Mercury Research put AMD’s market share at 1.3 percent, up from 0.5 percent earlier this year, the company has speculated that it expects to reach around 5 percent by the end of this year. Intel itself has said AMD could seize significant revenues in the sector; earlier this year in an interview with an Instinet industry analyst, former Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said the company’s objective is to limit AMD to between 15 and 20 percent of the server market.

Reached at the AMD conference, industry watcher Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, said, “The AWS-AMD Epyc news will likely be the biggest news of the day. I don’t see this as replacing Intel at AWS, but rather AMD getting some business for the first time there. I expect Intel to keep doing the lion’s share of business there for the foreseeable future. This is huge news for AMD.”

Norrod and AMD industry partners

For AMD, there’s no better cloud horse to jump on than AWS, whose public cloud services market share of above 35 percent is more than twice that of its nearest rival, Microsoft Azure. For the third quarter of this year, AWS cloud business revenues grew by 46 percent, and Amazon said it projects an annualized AWS run rate above $26 billion, compared with $18 billion for 2017. According to analyst group Synergy, quarterly cloud infrastructure service revenues were more than $17 billion.

“One thing our customers agree on is that they all like lower prices,” said Matt Garman, vice president, compute services, AWS. “Apart from adding to what is already the broadest and most capable set of compute services available in the cloud, these new AMD-based instances give customers an even lower priced way to run many of the most common applications.”

The AMD-AWS news adds to Epyc’s growing public cloud presence. Last month, AMD and Oracle announced availability on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, following deployments on Azure, Baidu and Packet, a bare metal cloud for developers. In addition, SkySilk, a new public cloud provider that launched last month and provides Linux instances, also offers Epyc hardware.

In other AMD news today, the company announced the AMD Radeon Instinct MI60 and MI50 accelerators, which AMD said are the world’s first 7nm datacenter GPUs, designed for deep learning, HPC, cloud computing and rendering applications.

AMD said the accelerators provide ultra-fast floating-point performance and hyper-fast HBM2 (second-generation High-Bandwidth Memory) with up to 1 TB/s memory bandwidth speeds. They are also the first GPUs capable of supporting next-generation PCIe 4.02 interconnect, up to 2X faster than other x86 CPU-to-GPU interconnect technologies, and feature AMD Infinity Fabric Link GPU interconnect technology that enables GPU-to-GPU communications up to 6X faster than PCIe Gen 3 interconnect speeds, according to AMD.

A version of this article first published by HPCwire’s sister publication, EnterpriseTech,

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

Empowering High-Performance Computing for Artificial Intelligence

April 19, 2024

Artificial intelligence (AI) presents some of the most challenging demands in information technology, especially concerning computing power and data movement. As a result of these challenges, high-performance computing Read more…

Kathy Yelick on Post-Exascale Challenges

April 18, 2024

With the exascale era underway, the HPC community is already turning its attention to zettascale computing, the next of the 1,000-fold performance leaps that have occurred about once a decade. With this in mind, the ISC Read more…

2024 Winter Classic: Texas Two Step

April 18, 2024

Texas Tech University. Their middle name is ‘tech’, so it’s no surprise that they’ve been fielding not one, but two teams in the last three Winter Classic cluster competitions. Their teams, dubbed Matador and Red Read more…

2024 Winter Classic: The Return of Team Fayetteville

April 18, 2024

Hailing from Fayetteville, NC, Fayetteville State University stayed under the radar in their first Winter Classic competition in 2022. Solid students for sure, but not a lot of HPC experience. All good. They didn’t Read more…

Software Specialist Horizon Quantum to Build First-of-a-Kind Hardware Testbed

April 18, 2024

Horizon Quantum Computing, a Singapore-based quantum software start-up, announced today it would build its own testbed of quantum computers, starting with use of Rigetti’s Novera 9-qubit QPU. The approach by a quantum Read more…

2024 Winter Classic: Meet Team Morehouse

April 17, 2024

Morehouse College? The university is well-known for their long list of illustrious graduates, the rigor of their academics, and the quality of the instruction. They were one of the first schools to sign up for the Winter Read more…

Kathy Yelick on Post-Exascale Challenges

April 18, 2024

With the exascale era underway, the HPC community is already turning its attention to zettascale computing, the next of the 1,000-fold performance leaps that ha Read more…

Software Specialist Horizon Quantum to Build First-of-a-Kind Hardware Testbed

April 18, 2024

Horizon Quantum Computing, a Singapore-based quantum software start-up, announced today it would build its own testbed of quantum computers, starting with use o Read more…

MLCommons Launches New AI Safety Benchmark Initiative

April 16, 2024

MLCommons, organizer of the popular MLPerf benchmarking exercises (training and inference), is starting a new effort to benchmark AI Safety, one of the most pre Read more…

Exciting Updates From Stanford HAI’s Seventh Annual AI Index Report

April 15, 2024

As the AI revolution marches on, it is vital to continually reassess how this technology is reshaping our world. To that end, researchers at Stanford’s Instit Read more…

Intel’s Vision Advantage: Chips Are Available Off-the-Shelf

April 11, 2024

The chip market is facing a crisis: chip development is now concentrated in the hands of the few. A confluence of events this week reminded us how few chips Read more…

The VC View: Quantonation’s Deep Dive into Funding Quantum Start-ups

April 11, 2024

Yesterday Quantonation — which promotes itself as a one-of-a-kind venture capital (VC) company specializing in quantum science and deep physics  — announce Read more…

Nvidia’s GTC Is the New Intel IDF

April 9, 2024

After many years, Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) was back in person and has become the conference for those who care about semiconductors and AI. I Read more…

Google Announces Homegrown ARM-based CPUs 

April 9, 2024

Google sprang a surprise at the ongoing Google Next Cloud conference by introducing its own ARM-based CPU called Axion, which will be offered to customers in it Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Eyes on the Quantum Prize – D-Wave Says its Time is Now

January 30, 2024

Early quantum computing pioneer D-Wave again asserted – that at least for D-Wave – the commercial quantum era has begun. Speaking at its first in-person Ana Read more…

GenAI Having Major Impact on Data Culture, Survey Says

February 21, 2024

While 2023 was the year of GenAI, the adoption rates for GenAI did not match expectations. Most organizations are continuing to invest in GenAI but are yet to Read more…

The GenAI Datacenter Squeeze Is Here

February 1, 2024

The immediate effect of the GenAI GPU Squeeze was to reduce availability, either direct purchase or cloud access, increase cost, and push demand through the roof. A secondary issue has been developing over the last several years. Even though your organization secured several racks... Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire