AWS Officially Announces G3 Instances For Amazon EC2

In need of some high-performance graphics acceleration up in the cloud? AWS has got you covered, as the company has just announced G3 instances for Amazon EC2.

This next generation instance type offers the most CPU and memory in the cloud, making them perfect for workloads that demand this graphical prowess — like 3D rendering, 3D visualizations, video encoding, and virtual reality applications.

Users that require graphics-intensive workstations, or power in the cloud to run complex modelling and 3D visualization analysis for medical image processing, seismic visualization tasks, and computer-aided design will have access to the latest technology and hardware.

Matt Garman, Vice President, Amazon EC2 talked about this new launch:

“AWS was the first to offer cloud instances customized for graphics-intensive applications. In 2010, we launched the CG1 instance type to provide a cost-effective, high-performance instance for graphics-heavy applications, and today, G3, our third generation GPU-powered instance, serves the most demanding graphics workloads such as 3D rendering and data visualization.

Today, AWS provides the broadest range of cloud instance types to support a wide variety of workloads. Customers have told us that having the ability to choose the right instance for the right workload enables them to operate more efficiently and go to market faster, which is why we continue to innovate to better support any workload.”

In terms of raw power, G3 instances offer double the CPU power and double the host memory per GPU than the most powerful GPU cloud instances that were available until today.

And in order to deliver the best performance for these power-hungry applications, the largest G3 instance offers twice the CPU power and eight times the host memory of G2, the previous generation graphics instance that Amazon Web Services offered.

The G3 instance also features new technology to speed video frame processing and improve the image fidelity for graphics workloads, thanks to the NVIDIA Tesla M60 graphics processors and the Intel Xeon Broadwell central processing units.

It also offers support for NVIDIA GRID Virtual Workstation capabilities.

You can find out the complete details about this new instance type here.