Tag: AMD

NVIDIA Tesla GPUs Adopted by Tencent Cloud for Artificial Intelligence Computing

Tencent Cloud, the rapidly growing Chinese public cloud and gaming platform, has announced that it will adopt the NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators within its public cloud platform. Tencent’s adoption of NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators expands its artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities for its customer-base and subsequently strengthens its ability to support the growing contemporary proliferation of artificial intelligence, machine learning and neural network-based applications. Specifically, the Tencent Cloud will support the availability of NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators including the Tesla P100 and P40 GPU accelerators that feature NVIDIA’s Pascal-based architecture and NVIDIA’s NVLINK technology for connecting several GPUs with NVIDIA deep learning software. Tencent Cloud’s ability to support Tesla’s P100 and P40 GPU accelerators means that customers now have access to some of NVIDIA’s most powerful hardware for artificial intelligence and deep learning use cases that can empower data scientists to reduce the learning time required for artificially intelligent algorithms and support data intensive workloads.

In December, the Tencent Cloud launched cloud servers based on Tesla M40 GPUs. As of this week’s announcement, customers can expect the availability of cloud servers that support Tesla P100, P40 and M40 GPU accelerators to serve the artificial intelligence needs of customers that include cloud service providers, startups, research organizations and enterprises. Tencent’s announcement of its expanded support for NVIDIA GPU accelerators means that NVIDIA GPUs are now used on a roster of cloud platforms that include Google, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM Softlayer. Importantly, Tencent’s support for NVIDIA bolsters the latter’s positioning in the microprocessor space in the face of increased competition from AMD and its recently released line of Ryzen chips that have been instrumental to the meteoric rise of AMD’s share price. As a result, NVIDIA continues to strengthen its leadership space in the landscape of hardware dedicated to artificial intelligence by demonstrating continued success in seeding cloud platforms with its artificial intelligence and deep learning technology. NVIDIA’s collaboration with Tencent is particularly notable because it expands NVIDIA’s access to customers in China and East Asia, more generally, thereby giving it an invaluable leadership position in the rapidly growing market for artificial intelligence computing in China and the Asian Pacific Rim.

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AMD’s Deal With Google Promises To Expand Adoption Of AMD GPUs In The Cloud

AMD has announced that Google Compute Engine and the Google Cloud Machine Learning platform will use AMD’s Radeon GPU (graphics processing units) technology to deliver accelerated performance to facilitate computationally-intensive simulations for use cases such as “complex medical and financial simulations, seismic and subsurface exploration, machine learning, video rendering and transcoding, and scientific analysis.” AMD FirePro™ S9300 x2 Server GPUs can handle parallel calculations that illustrate AMD’s progress with respect to GPU-based hardware. AMD’s deal with Google is particularly significant because most cloud vendors have used Nvidia GPUs for computationally intensive use cases such as deep learning, to date. As of 2017, Google will use the K80 and P100 GPU chips based on Nvidia’s Tesla architecture as well as AMD’s FirePro S9300, designed using AMD’s Polaris architecture.

Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and the IBM Cloud, for example, use Nvidia GPUs. Google’s decision to use a combination of Nvidia and AMD GPUs for its data centers empowers Google Cloud to avoid vendor dependency and obtain greater negotiating power in the procurement process. AMD’s partnership with Google represents the second major cloud vendor that has opted to use its GPU technology, following upon Alibaba’s October 2016 decision to use AMD’s Radeon Pro chips for servers powering its cloud infrastructure. AMD’s deal with Google, however, represents a far more significant milestone in its bid to restore market share lost to Intel and Nvidia by carving out a niche within hyperscale cloud datacenters. AMD will hope to capitalize on its partnership with Google by expanding it the likes of Azure and Amazon Web Services. Meanwhile, AMD plans to release a GPU based on the combination of its forthcoming Vega architecture for GPUs and the recently announced Zen CPU that improves upon its existing Polaris GPU architecture.