Amazon debuts Trainium, a custom chip for machine learning training in the cloud

Amazon today debuted AWS Trainium, a chip custom-designed to deliver what the company describes as cost-effective machine learning model training in the cloud. It comes ahead of the availability of new Habana Gaudi-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances built specifically for machine learning training, powered by Intel's new Habana Gaudi processors. "We know that we want to keep pushing the price performance on machine learning training, so we're going to have to invest in our own chips," AWS CEO Andy Jassy said during a keynote address at Amazon's re:Invent conference this morning. "You have an unmatched array of instances in AWS, coupled with innovation in chips." Amazon claims that Trainium will offer the most teraflops of any machine learning instance in the cloud, where a teraflop translates to a chip being able to process 1 trillion calculations a second.