Watch this video to get an explanation of how Amazon Silk has been designed to leverage Amazon's Cloud.

And, where does the Silk name come from?

A thread of silk is an invisible yet incredibly strong connection between two different things. In our case it is the connection between your kindle fire and Amazon Compute Cloud.

Here is the consumer explanation of Silk.

Amazon Silk

What is Amazon Silk?

Amazon Silk is a new kind of web browser, built from the ground up to leverage the power and capabilities of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud to fundamentally rethink the level of performance and functionality that a browser can provide.

Do people really need another browser?

Browser development has really accelerated in recent years, with new entrants emerging and big upgrades from legacy browsers. If we only thought we could deliver “another” browser, we wouldn’t have bothered. In the case of Amazon Silk, however, we are very excited about the potential for this “cloud-powered” browser to truly delight our customers.

How does “the cloud” make this browser faster?

With Amazon Silk, most of the heavy-lifting is shifted from the processor on your device to our powerful AWS servers. Access to such lightning fast CPUs, expansive memory, and huge network connections allows the performance of Amazon Silk to transcend the capabilities of your local device. Amazon Silk isn’t just about massive computing power, however. Because much of the intelligence of the browser is in the cloud, a number of performance enhancements become possible, including squeezing the utmost throughput out of your “last mile” connection, smart caching both on your device and on our servers, and on-the-fly content optimizations. In addition, Amazon Silk has the ability to learn about traffic patterns on individual sites over time, allowing it to begin fetching the next page that users may wish to visit.