AWS activates NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPUs

Amazon Web Services announced the general availability of G4 instances, a new GPU-powered Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance featuring the latest generation NVIDIA T4 GPUs, custom 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable (Cascade Lake) processors, up to 100 Gbps of networking throughput, and up to 1.8 TB of local NVMe storage.

AWS says these are the most cost-effective GPU instances for machine learning inference to date.

The G4 instances deliver up to 65 TFLOPs of mixed-precision performance, but could also be used cost-effectively for small-scale and entry-level machine learning training jobs that are less sensitive to time-to-train. G4 instances also provide a compute engine for graphics-intensive workloads, offering up to a 1.8x increase in graphics performance and up to 2x video transcoding capability over the previous generation G3 instances. These performance enhancements enable customers to use remote workstations in the cloud for running graphics-intensive applications like Autodesk Maya or 3D Studio Max, as well as efficiently create photo-realistic and high-resolution 3D content for movies and games.

“We focus on solving the toughest challenges that hold our customers back from taking advantage of compute intensive applications,” said Matt Garman, Vice President, Compute Services, AWS. “AWS offers the most comprehensive portfolio to build, train, and deploy machine learning models powered by Amazon EC2’s broad selection of instance types optimized for different machine learning use cases. With new G4 instances, we’re making it more affordable to put machine learning in the hands of every developer. And with support for the latest video decode protocols, customers running graphics applications on G4 instances get superior graphics performance over G3 instances at the same cost.”