Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of its third generation (G3) EC2 instances.
G3 instances are the next generation of the Amazon EC2 and combine CPU and RAM for workloads such as 3D rendering and visualisations. The new instance offers double the CPU power and double the host memory per GPU than the most powerful GPU cloud instance available today.
AWS said that customers who require significant CPU processing power and memory, such as for medical image processing or seismic visualisation jobs, can now use this instance for the best performance in these graphic-intensive applications. The G3 instance apparently offers twice the CPU power and eight times the host memory of the previous generation graphics instance, the G2.
In terms of specs, the G3 features four NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPUs with 64 CPUs using the latest custom Intel Xeon E5-2686v4 (Broadwell) processors and 488GB of RAM. It is also able to support four monitors with resolutions of up to 4K, through its NVIDIA GRID virtual workstation capabilities, and has hardware encoding for up to 10 H.265 (HEVC) 1080p30 streams per GPU.
Matt Garman, VP at Amazon EC2 said that the G3 serves the most demanding workloads such as 3D rendering and data visualization. He added: "Customers have told us that having the ability to choose the right instance for the right workload enables them to operate more efficiently and go to market faster, which is why we continue to innovate to better support any workload."
