New P2 Instance Type for Amazon EC2 – Up to 16 GPUs

I like to watch long-term technology and business trends and watch as they shape the products and services that I get to use and to write about. As I was preparing to write today's post, three such trends came to mind: As the industry pushes forward in accord with these trends, a couple of interesting challenges have surfaced over the past decade or so. Again, here's a quick list (yes, I do think in bullet points): The GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) was born of these trends, and addresses many of the challenges! Processors have reached the upper bound on clock rates, but Moore's Law gives designers more and more transistors to work with. Those transistors can be used to add more cache and more memory to a traditional architecture, but the von Neumann Bottleneck limits the value of doing so. On the other hand, we now have large markets for specialized hardware (gaming comes to mind as one of the early drivers for GPU consumption).