Google Unveils 1st Public Cloud VMs using Nvidia Ampere A100 Tensor GPUs

Google today introduced the Accelerator-Optimized VM (A2) instance family on Google Compute Engine based on the NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPU, launched in mid-May. Available in alpha and with up to 16 GPUs, A2 VMs are the first A100-based offering in a public cloud, according to Google. At its launch, Nvidia said the A100, built on the company’s new Ampere architecture, delivers “the greatest generational leap ever,” according to Nvidia, enhancing training and inference computing performance by 20x over its predecessors.

New Class of Intel Xeon Scalable Processors Break Through Performance Bottlenecks

Unlocking the bigger-picture meaning from raw data volumes is no easy task. Unfortunately, that means that many important insights remain hidden within the untapped data which quietly floods data centers around the globe each day. Today’s advanced applications require faster and increasingly powerful hardware and storage technologies to make sense of the data deluge. Intel seeks to address this critical trend with a new class of future Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, code-named Cascade Lake.

Video: New Cascade Lake Xeons to Speed Ai with Intel Deep Learning Boost

This week at the Data-Centric Innovation Summit, Intel laid out their near-term Xeon roadmap and plans to augment their AVX-512 instruction set to boost machine learning performance. “This dramatic performance improvement and efficiency – up to twice as fast as the current generation – is delivered by using a single instruction to handle INT8 convolutions for deep learning inference workloads which required three separate AVX-512 instructions in previous generation processors.”