Amazon Silk refers to the Fire's browser and its underlying technology. The idea behind Silk is to offload some processing onto Amazon's EC2 cloud, decreasing the time it takes to render a webpage on a comparatively slow mobile device and reducing overall power consumption. In theory, this should help extend battery life. And while this sounds awesome on paper, it's perhaps not a real benefit when put to actual use.
The problem is in its execution. To begin, Silk doesn't use the cloud to accelerate every webpage. Second, even when it uses the cloud, Silk dynamically determines what parts of the browser subsystems (for instance, networking, HTML, page rendering) to accelerate.

This graph was generated from a debugging script that polled CPU usage on the Kindle Fire. It illustrates the performance difference between processing a webpage locally and using Amazon's cloud.
The CPU workload is evenly distributed during a local test, as the browser requests data and processes it in real-time. When you enable cloud acceleration, the Fire idles for a short period while it waits on the EC2 servers to collect webpage data.
However, in order to counterbalance the time spent idle, Amazon's servers uses the SPDY compression protocol from Google to send information back. This is partly why cloud acceleration should be faster. After receiving the data, though, the Fire still needs to take what it received and generate the page itself. The thing is, what gets compressed must then be decompressed. And that's why CPU usage spikes.

The benefits of cloud acceleration aren't necessarily evident when you look at CPU usage alone; the time it takes to receive data, decompress it, and render differs from one page to another. Generally, cloud acceleration is enabled when there are a lot of HTML elements, seen on sites like cnn.com and our stories. When it does occur, the speed-up isn't really that dramatic.

Overall, power consumption tends to be a wash when you compare a local job to cloud-based acceleration.
It's also possible that I'm not requesting data from a site with a slow connection to my ISP. In that case, the rendering speed could be faster in the cloud, since Amazon has some of the fastest data pipes in the world.

As with most Web browsers, Silk maintains a local cache of data. Amazon doesn't specify how much space it sets aside, but as you browse more sites, Silk clears old data to make sure space is available. With cloud acceleration enabled, Amazon is supposed to prefetch certain linked webpages. However, requesting a linked page not stored in cache turns out to be faster when cloud acceleration is disabled. See Appendix B for instructions on how to disable cloud acceleration.
- Meet Amazon's Kindle Fire
- Quick Navigation Tour
- Books And Documents: Not Quite An e-Book Reader...
- Video And Music: Amazon Prime Members Rejoice
- Amazon Appstore Is Not Android Market
- The Shopping Experience: All About Amazon
- Amazon Silk: Assisted Web Browsing (Sort Of)
- Web Browsing: The Same Old Android Restrictions
- TI's OMAP 4430: CPU And GPU Performance
- An Experiment: Gaming Performance, Tegra 2-Porting
- Storage Performance: Slightly Faster Than USB 1.0?!
- Display Performance: IPS Confirmed
- Display Performance Examined: Very Bright, So-So Gamut
- Benchmark Results: Battery Life And Recharge Time
- Benchmark Results: Real-World Performance
- Benchmark Results: Wireless Performance
- Awesome For Amazon Addicts
- Appendix A: Background Information On Our Benchmarks
- Appendix B: Notes For Kindle Fire Owners
Ummm.... what?
Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com
Ummm.... what?
Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com
Just give him the 6990, the poor fellow just wants to play BF3.
Ever heard of bots? There're tons of those on Tom's nowadays.
A GPU of a 560 Ti level maxes it out @ 1080p, no need for a 6990.
Back to topic...
ROFL, and who needs a tablet without all that? That's right, Amazon fanboys. That company is an utter POS that is not unlike Apple, designing underpowered useless products and delivering them as "innovative". The only "innovative" thing here is a complete dependency on the company's online services... oops, nevermind, Apple did it first
And do not say "ya, but you can root it!!!". That's nice, people can jailbreak their iPads. You cannot include rooting and jailbreaking when you talk about something being open
The Fire doesn't have either of those things. Not going to work. You should check out the specs of the Fire first.
Oh yeah? You bought a Fire?
Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com
This article is a big fail.. they should have included it to compare.
Just sayin...
You can say the same thing with the Ipad and the Itunes store. Except for the fact that Amazon isn't making money with just selling the Kindle Fire alone.
Still though I like both the Ipad and Kindle Fire.
Also, I want to elaborate on the GPU. The OMAP 4430's SGX540 runs at 300MHz, not 200MHz, so those figures are a little misleading.
It seems like a good product from Amazon, but for my expected use, it isn't sufficient. I mainly use my iPod touch to read comics in JPEG format, so not being able to install many apps + having limited space really hurts.
Glad you liked it! Most of the time I cringe when the table discussion turns to tablets. A lot of tech reviewers aren't even really technies. They come from a Communication background, which is why the Fire is always pitted in a iPad 2 fight. Plus, the investors want the Apple fight cause they only see things in terms of units sold.
The engineers and consumers want a comparison based on features and usability. And the executives and PR people want a comparison based on demographics.
The truth lies somewhere in the middle. For me, this tablet is very attractive, but then again, I like amazon. If you're not part of that crowd, it's a harder purchase to justify in the long run.
Cheers,
Andrew Ku
TomsHardware.com