What Happened: 

The newest AWS custom-designed chip, AWS Trainium, was announced during Andy Jassy’s 2020 re:Invent keynote, with the projected best price performance for training Machine Learning (ML) models in the cloud. Meant for deep learning training workloads for applications, it includes capabilities of image classification, semantic search, translation, voice recognition, NLP (Natural Language Processing), and recommendation engines.

Why It’s Important: 

• Lower Costs: AWS Trainium instances are specifically targeted for reducing the training costs, in addition to the existing savings through using AWS Inferentia, which focuses on the inference factors of ML applications.
• Easy Integration: Since it shares the same AWS Neuron SDK as AWS Inferentia, it’s easier for developers with Inferentia experience to start working with AWS Trainium. SDK integrates with popular ML frameworks like Pytorch, MXNet, and Tensorflow, making it easier for developers to move GPU instances to AWS with minimal code changes.
• Greater Capabilities: This chip is optimized for training deep learning models for applications using images, text, and audio, which means more opportunities to build solutions that solve operational business challenges across industries.

Why We’re Excited

AWS Trainium will be the most sophisticated and advanced training technology leveraged to deliver elegant solutions to address customer challenges and project requirements. Since it integrates with and complements AWS Inferentia, ML training capabilities will significantly increase with optimized speed, skill, and efficiency. As the most cost-effective option with the broadest set of capabilities and robust AWS toolset to support it, end-to-end workflows can be created to scale AI/ML training workloads faster and bring products or services to market at an accelerated rate.

Availability:

AWS Trainium is available as an EC2 instance and will be available in Amazon Sagemaker in the 2^nd half of 2021.

If you’re looking to explore these services further and need some guidance, let us know and we’ll connect you to an Idexcel expert!