Coming Soon – Amazon EC2 G4ad Instances Featuring AMD GPUs for Graphics Workloads

Update (December 9, 2020) – The G4ad instances described in this post are available today in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) regions.

Customers with high performance graphic workloads, such as game streaming, animation, and video rendering for example, are always looking for higher performance with less cost. Today, I’m happy to announce new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances in the G4 instance family are in the works and will be available soon, to improve performance and reduce cost for graphics-intensive workloads. The new G4ad instances feature AMD’s latest Radeon Pro V520 GPUs and 2nd generation EPYC processors, and are the first in EC2 to feature AMD GPUs.

G4dn instances, released in 2019 and featuring NVIDIA T4 GPUs, were previously the most cost-effective GPU-based instances in EC2. G4dn instances are ideal for deploying machine learning models in production and also graphics-intensive applications. However, when compared to G4dn the new G4ad instances enable up to 45% better price performance for graphics-intensive workloads, including the aforementioned game streaming, remote graphics workstations, and rendering scenarios. Compared to an equally-sized G4dn instance, G4ad instances offer up to 40% improvement in performance.

G4dn instances will continue to be the best option for small-scale machine learning (ML) training and GPU-based ML inference due to included hardware optimizations like Tensor Cores. Additionally, G4dn instances are still best suited for graphics applications that need access to NVIDIA libraries such as CUDA, CuDNN, and NVENC. However, when there is no dependency on NVIDIA’s libraries, we recommend customers try the G4ad instances to benefit from the improved price and performance.

AMD Radeon Pro V520 GPUs in G4ad instances support DirectX 11/12, Vulkan 1.1, and OpenGL 4.5 APIs. For operating systems, customers can choose from Windows Server 2016/2019, Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu 18.04.3, and CentOS 7.7. Instances using G4ad can be purchased as On-Demand, Savings Plan, Reserved Instances, or Spot Instances. Three instance sizes are available, from G4ad.4xlarge, with 1 GPU, to G4ad.16xlarge with 4 GPUs, as shown below.

The new G4ad instances will be available soon in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland).

Learn more about G4ad instances.