The world looks very different from a year ago, but one thing remains the same. Whether people are remote or in the office, employees including professional designers, game developers, and engineers need access to workstation-class performance to run their applications and to be their most productive.
This creates an interesting challenge for IT departments, the businesses they support, and of course, the budget they have. They need to deliver the full pro workstation experience their users rely on to power visually demanding workloads, but without the impracticality of providing expensive workstations to every employee.
Virtual Machines (VMs) delivered from the cloud naturally point the way, but three, interrelated obstacles have limited IT managers to date:
- The need to deliver a cost-effective, task-appropriate combination of GPU and CPU capability from the cloud without being trapped by expensive over-configured platforms that will be under-utilized and burdened by license fees.
- The expectation of maximum productivity from the design, creative, and analytics professionals who rely on workstation-class performance. And doing this from home and other remote scenarios.
- The requirements for stability, compatibility and collaboration. Ensuring a virtualized workplace functions at least as smoothly, and preferably even better, than the current on-premises workstation deployment.
That is what makes the three new G4ad instances for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) so compelling. Powered by 2nd Gen AMD EPYCTM “Rome” CPUs and AMD RadeonTM Pro V520 “Navi” GPUs built on the latest 7nm “Zen 2” and AMD RDNA architectures respectively, G4ad make it possible to host highly demanding applications and the latest game development engines in the cloud while striking an optimal balance between cost and no-compromise performance. As a result, the Amazon EC2 G4ad instances have 45% better price to performance compared to G4dn instances.
Flexible Deployments and Easy Management
Amazon EC2 G4ad instances are available in three different sizes to suit the varying needs of remote workstation users. By offering these variants it is now possible for IT managers to better dial-in their cloud provisioning, selecting, adding, and reducing options as needed on a per-user basis to provide optimized services.
The AMD Experience
AMD powered Amazon G4ad instances feature finely-balanced pairings of EPYC CPU cores that are ideally matched to AMD Radeon Pro GPU acceleration. High Bandwidth Memory (HBM2) handles large models and datasets to provide a smooth user experience for highly demanding tasks. AMD CPU and GPU’s hyper-efficient and high bandwidth implementation of PCI Express 4.0 interconnects helps ensure exceptional data throughput between GPU memory and VM storage to assure the application responsiveness that designers and games developers expect from a modern workstation.
In short, users have the power and performance needed for highly demanding tasks, whether that means building immersive game environments, executing professional designs and visualizations, or processing sophisticated 3D renders.
Compatibility and Reliability
The AMD Radeon Pro GPU used in all G4ad instances features error-correcting code memory (ECC) that helps safeguard your critical data. ECC automatically detects and corrects most memory errors to reduce data corruption. Enjoy the latest support for workstation applications and key programming APIs (DirectX, Vulkan, OpenGL and OpenCL) to help ensure maximum flexibility and stability when working with professional applications or game engines. The MD comprehensive stability testing process helps ensure that every AMD Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise driver delivers enterprise-grade quality and reliability to end-users.
Amazon EC2 G4ad Instances support multiple high-performance remoting display protocols at launch including Amazon NICE DCV and Teradici Cloud Access Software providing customers with a secure way to deliver remote desktops and application streaming from any cloud to any device, over varying network conditions. Amazon NICE DCV is built for remoting graphics-intensive applications making it a perfect remoting protocol to combine with Amazon EC2 G4ad Instances and there is no additional charge to use NICE DCV on AWS. Teradici Cloud Access Software is built on their industry-leading PCoIP technology providing a secure high-performance remote visualization capabilities to deliver a great user experience for graphics-intensive applications and workloads including computer-aided design (CAD), architectural design, game development, 3D modeling and video editing.
Check out this video from Amazon EC2 to get a closer look at G4ad instances 2nd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Radeon Pro V520 GPUs.
Resources:
- Amazon Press Release
- AMD Press Release
- Amazon EC2 G4ad product information
- AMD.com/g4ad
- AMD Radeon Pro V520 Graphics
- AMD & AWS
Michael DeNeffe is AMD’s Director of Cloud Graphics and has over 25 years of experience in network computing, and client device technologies. He has also held senior management positions at NVIDIA, Teradici, Wyse, Transmeta, and NEC. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
Over the last ten years, Michael has focused on the emerging and dynamic desktop virtualization market. Prior to is position at AMD, he led the worldwide product marketing effort for NVIDIA GRID technology. Prior to that he was Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for Teradici Corporation and was instrumental in bringing to market the innovative PC-over-IP technology and protocol. And before that, he led the product management and marketing teams for Wyse Technology. There, he launched numerous thin computing products and earned a U. S. patent for the innovative design which is still in the market today.
Michael has both undergraduate and master’s degrees from Santa Clara University.
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