AWS Using AMD Graphics For Its Cloud

Things are getting really interesting! AWS has just made official a deal where it will be using AMD graphics technology to power GPU instances for graphics acceleration.

Days after Walmart announced that it would be teaming up with NVIDIA to move away from AWS.

Obviously, these are unrelated events, for the most part, but this latest development is certainly great news for AMD, and a win for the chip giant that has been on a roll of late. Both on the processors front, and in the graphics domain.

Amazon Web Services, meanwhile, will be using technology from AMD for AppStream 2.0, an offering that allows direct streaming of desktop applications from AWS servers to devices running web browsers.

According to AMD, its Radeon Pro MxGPU will be used for this, and these new solutions pave the way for cheaper and faster graphics processing.

And in fact, the cloud giant actually already introduced a new GPU instance called Graphic Design last week, intended to accelerate graphics. This new instance is based on the AMD FirePro S7150x2 Server GPUs that are equipped with AMD Multiuser GPU technology.

AWS says that the new instance type allows users to run graphics application at a fraction of the cost of using graphics workstations.

Not just that, the company also touts massive reductions in the costs of streaming graphics apps with AppStream 2.0, by up to 50% in some cases. An impressive feat, considering the fact that achieving fast graphics performance in the cloud has long been challenging.

Worth a mention that AppStream 2.0 already offers GPU instances based on NVIDIA graphics processing units, including the Tesla M60.

But with this development, Amazon has become the latest cloud company to use the Radeon Pro technology, after Google and Alibaba.

Read up more on Radeon Pro virtualized GPUs, billed as the industry’s first and only hardware based virtualization technology in a processing unit here.