Amazon’s newly-announced tablet, the Fire, uses a new browsing technology to enhance performance. Read on for details.
Amazon introduced new browsing technology called Silk to leverage the power of the Amazon cloud to speed up searches and browsing. Here is what they said:
Accelerated Web Browser, Available Exclusively on Kindle Fire
Amazon’s cloud computing infrastructure and eight years of cloud computing expertise come together in new web browser for Kindle Fire—Amazon’s new Kindle for movies, music, books, magazines, apps, games, and web browsing
SEATTLE, Sep 28, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) — (NASDAQ: AMZN)–Amazon Silk introduces a radical new paradigm – a “split browser” architecture that accelerates the power of the mobile device hardware by using the computing speed and power of the Amazon Web Services cloud (AWS). The Silk browser software resides both on Kindle Fire and on the massive server fleet that comprises the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). With each page request, Silk dynamically determines a division of labor between the mobile hardware and Amazon EC2 (i.e. which browser sub-components run where) that takes into consideration factors like network conditions, page complexity and the location of any cached content. The result is a faster web browsing experience, and it’s available exclusively on Kindle Fire, Amazon’s new Kindle for movies, music, books, magazines, apps, games, and web browsing.
“Kindle Fire introduces a revolutionary new web browser called Amazon Silk,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO. “We refactored and rebuilt the browser software stack and now push pieces of the computation into the AWS cloud. When you use Silk – without thinking about it or doing anything explicit – you’re calling on the raw computational horsepower of Amazon EC2 to accelerate your web browsing.”
Modern websites have become complex. For example, on a recent day, constructing the CNN.com home page required 161 files served from 25 unique domains. This degree of complexity is common. In fact, a typical web page requires 80 files served from 13 different domains. Latency over wireless connections is high – on the order of 100 milliseconds round trip. Serving a web page requires hundreds of such round trips, only some of which can be done in parallel. In aggregate, this adds seconds to page load times.
Conversely, Amazon EC2 is always connected to the backbone of the internet where round-trip latency is 5 milliseconds or less to most web sites rather than the 100 milliseconds seen over wireless connections. In addition, EC2 servers have massive computational power. On EC2, available CPU, storage, and available memory can be orders of magnitudes larger than on mobile devices. Silk uses the power and speed of the EC2 server fleet to retrieve all of the components of a website and deliver them to Kindle Fire in a single, fast stream.
