The journey of silicon innovation at
summary
AWS describes moving hypervisor IO into purpose-built silicon: a family of Nitro cards (five generations) powers 400+ EC2 instance types and a Nitro SSD design that claims up to 60% lower average I/O latency and 75% lower tail latency versus prior I3 hardware. Host CPUs evolve from Graviton2 (≈30B transistors) to Graviton3 (≈55B, ~25% higher IPC, 37% higher throughput on a Node.js benchmark, 20–80% gains reported by Twitter) with 3-socket servers for 50% more sockets per machine. Inferentia cuts inference cost up to 80% and Trainium boosts training speed (TF32 ~2.5x, FP32 ~5x) with higher memory and network bandwidth.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction to silicon innovation
- 1:27Why AWS builds custom chips
- 4:37Evolution of Nitro system
- 15:28Host compute with Graviton
- 27:45Machine learning with Inferentia
- 33:29Trainium for training workloads
- 35:39Future of silicon innovation
