cross pond high tech

Amazon is using next-generation 5G wireless networks to help businesses download data from the cloud faster.

At Amazon Web Services’ annual re:Invent conference on Tuesday, AWS CEO Andy Jassy said the company is introducing a new service, called WaveLength, which puts technology from AWS “at the edge of the 5G network,” or closer to users’ devices. It has the potential to deliver single-digit millisecond latencies to users, according to Amazon.

At launch, Amazon is partnering with Verizon to incorporate WaveLength technology into parts of its wireless network. Amazon is also working with other global partners, such as Vodafone, KDDI and SK Telecom.

Lower latency is one of the big benefits that’s expected to arrive with 5G networks. This means it doesn’t take as long for devices to communicate with each other. For users, it results in fewer disruptions and shorter lag times when streaming videos, among other applications. 5G has the potential for many business-to-business applications, such as improving connectivity of IoT devices in manufacturing, self-driving, health care and other areas, in addition to consumer applications, such as faster streaming on phones.

“The connectivity and the speed is just two things,” Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg said on stage Tuesday at AWS’ re:Invent conference. “We can with 5G now bring the processing out to the edge because we have a virtualized network.”

With the partnership, AWS’ compute, storage, database and analytics tools are all “embedded” at the edge of 5G networks, Jassy said in an interview with CNBC’s Jon Fortt that aired Tuesday.

“That means now you only go from the device to the metro aggregation site, which is where the 5G tower is, where AWS is embedded there, and you get AWS,” Jassy said. “So it totally changes the response rates and the latency and what you can get done.”

Amazon is launching WaveLength at a time when excitement is ramping up around 5G networks. The technology is expected to be used more broadly by device makers, carriers and cable companies in 2020.

After years of waiting for someone to design an Arm server processor that could work at scale on the cloud, Amazon Web Services just went ahead and designed its own. Vice president of infrastructure Peter DeSantis introduced the AWS Graviton Processor Monday night, adding a third chip option for cloud customers alongside instances that use processors from Intel and AMD. The company did not provide a lot of details about the processor itself, but DeSantis said that it was designed for scale-out workloads that benefit from a lot of servers chipping away at a problem.

Amazon Web Services launched its Graviton2 processors, which promise up to 40% better performance from comparable x86-based instances for 20% less. Graviton2, based on the Arm architectuare, may have a big impact on cloud workloads, AWS' cost structure, and Arm in the data center.

 

Graviton2 was unveiled at AWS' re:Invent 2019 conference and ZDNet was debriefed by the EC2 team in an exclusive. Unlike the Graviton effort and A1 instances unveiled a year ago, Graviton2 ups the ante for processor makers such as Intel and AMD. With Graviton2, AWS is making it clear that it is serious about Arm processors in the data center as well as moving cloud infrastructure innovation at its pace.

"We're going big for our customers and our internal workloads," said Raj Pai, vice president of AWS EC2. AWS is launching new Arm-based versions of Amazon EC2 M, R, and C instance families.

Indeed, Graviton2, which is optimized for cloud-native applications, is based on 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and a custom system on a chip designed by AWS. Graviton2 boasts 2x faster floating-point performance per core for scientific and high-performance workloads, support for up to 64 virtual CPUs, 25Gbps of networking, and 18Gbps of EBS Bandwidth.

AWS CEO Andy Jassy said the new Graviton2 instances illustrate the benefits of designing your own chips. "We decided that we were going to design chips to give you more capabilities. While lots of companies have been working with x86 for a long time, we wanted to push the price to performance ratio for you," said Jassy during his keynote. Jassy added that Intel and AMD remain key partners to AWS.