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!

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

Nvidia Appoints Andy Grant as EMEA Director of Supercomputing, Higher Education, and AI

March 22, 2024

Nvidia recently appointed Andy Grant as Director, Supercomputing, Higher Education, and AI for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). With over 25 years of high-performance computing (HPC) experience, Grant brings a Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen 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…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Houston We Have a Solution: Addressing the HPC and Tech Talent Gap

March 15, 2024

Generations of Houstonian teachers, counselors, and parents have either worked in the aerospace industry or know people who do - the prospect of entering the fi Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

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…

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…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer 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…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire