AWS introduces Workspaces bundles for heavy-duty graphics apps

AWS introduces Workspaces bundles for heavy-duty graphics apps

AWS introduced several new bundles in Amazon Workspaces, its Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) portfolio. The Graphics.g4dn and GraphicsPro.g4dn Workspaces feature instance store technology for local storage capacity.

According to the tech giant, the new Amazon Workspaces bundles are particularly suitable for heavy-duty graphics applications. For this purpose, the bundles come in powerful configurations.

The Graphics.g4d bundle has 4vCPUs, 16 GB of RAM and 16 GB of video memory. This bundle can be used for normal engineering, design and architecture applications.

The GraphicsPro.g4d bundle has 6vCPUs 64 GB of RAM and 16 GB of video memory. This is especially suitable for heavy graphics applications, such as media production, visualisation, GIS data processing, data intelligence, small machine learning model training and ML interference.

Both bundles run on second-gen Intel Xeon Scalable Cascade Lake processors. In addition, the bundles feature NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPUs.

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Instance store technology

Both bundles feature AWS instance store technology. The storage technology provides temporary block storage for each instance. The storage resides on SSDs that are physically connected to host computers. This offers temporary storage for data that changes frequently. Think of buffers, caches, scratch data and other temporary content.

Instance store also provides storage for data replicated across many instances, such as a load-balanced pool of web servers.

The Graphics.g4dn bundle’s instance store provides 125GB of temporary NVMe SSD local instance storage and a minimum of 100GB of persistent storage for the user and root volume. The GraphicsPro.g4dn bundle provides 225GB of temporary NVMe SSD and a minimum of 100GB persistent storage as well.

Previous Amazon Workspaces instances were limited to 100GB of storage for both root volumes and data. Instance store greatly extends capacity.

Firm pricing

The new Amazon Workspaces bundles aren’t cheap. Graphics.g4dn is available starting at $537 (€494) per month. The GraphicsPro.g4dn bundle costs a minimum of $959 (€882) per month.

The bundles are available in the following AWS cloud regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland, London), Asia Pacific (Mumbai, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo) and South America (São Paulo).

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