re:Invent 2019: Amazon is all-in on custom silicon
Summary
AWS CEO Andy Jassy heavily touted the importance of their custom silicon—the Nitro hypervisor silicon, a second version of the Graviton CPU using Arm Neoverse cores, and a new inference-focused Arm CPU for AI model training during the keynote address at re:Invent 2019 in Las Vegas. The Graviton2 processors offer customized 64-bit Neoverse cores with a 7mm production process, designed in-house through Amazons Annapurna Labs team, who were responsible for the first-generation Graviton. Inf1 instance for EC2, is proclaimed as "the fastest inferences in the cloud," with low latency, 3x higher throughput, and up to 40% lower cost-per-inference compared to G4, with support out of the box for TensorFlow, PyTorch, and MXNet. Amazons continued interest in building out their own silicon presents a problem for a number of hardware vendors, foremost among them Intel—considering Intels own difficulties with moves to 10nm. AMDs reversal of fortunes with the Zen architecture—and AWS, Azure, and Oracle offering Zen-powered instances—makes them the obvious alternative to Intel, considering that they share the x86-64 instruction set, and migration requires nothing more than changing the instance type.
