Amazon Announces Custom Machine Learning Chip and Satellite Uplink

[AlphaAtlas]

Amazon Web Services has been busy these last few days. The cloud provider has announced dozens of new services and enhancements, including instances based on Amazon's custom ARM chips. Among those announcements was the AWS Ground Station, which will allow customers to efficiently move data between satellites and Amazon's ground-based datacenters. But yesterday afternoon, Amazon made another big announcement: 13 new machine learning services, including some instances based on a "machine learning inference chip" developed by Amazon themselves.

AWS Inferentia provides hundreds of teraflops per chip and thousands of teraflops per Amazon EC2 instance for multiple frameworks (including TensorFlow, Apache MXNet, and PyTorch), and multiple data types (including INT-8 and mixed precision FP-16 and bfloat16)... "Running efficient inference is one of the biggest challenges in machine learning today," said Peter Jones, Head of AI Engineering for Autodesk Research. "Amazon Elastic Inference is the first capability of its kind we've found to help us eliminate excess costs that we incur today from idle GPU capacity. We estimate it will save us 75 percent in costs compared to running GPUs."

 

[katanaD]

Among those announcements was the AWS Ground Station, which will allow customers to efficiently move data between satellites and Amazon's ground-based datacenters

hmm, that would be interesting to learn more about.

and maybe.. amazon can get around to replacing the deep space network and upgrade it, cause it sure needs it.

 

[Ultima99]

One of these days the machines will learn a little too much and we'll be screwed.