Amazon Looks To Compete With Intel, Nvidia With New Chip Launch

Amazon cloud computing unit on Tuesday introduced two new custom computing chips aimed at helping its customers beat the cost of using chips from Intel and Nvidia, reported Reuters. 

With $45.37 billion in sales in 2020, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the world’s biggest cloud computing provider and one of the biggest buyers of data center chips, whose computing power AWS rents out to its customers. Ever since buying a startup called Annapurna Labs in 2015, AWS has worked to develop its own custom chips.

On Tuesday, the company released the third generation of its Graviton chip that is designed to compete with central processors from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. The Graviton3 is 25% faster than its predecessor, and Dave Brown, vice president of Elastic Compute Cloud at Amazon, told Reuters that the company expects it to provide a better performance per dollar than Intel’s chips.

AWS also said that a new class of chip called Trainium, which is designed to train machine learning computer models and will compete against chips from Nvidia, will soon be available to its customers. AWS expects it to train machine learning models for a cost that is 40% lower than Nvidia’s flagship chip.

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