Intel Powers Latest Amazon EC2 General Purpose Instances

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Intel announced AWS customers can access the latest 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors via the new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) M6i instances. Optimized for high-performance, general-purpose compute, the latest Intel-powered Amazon EC2 instances provide customers increased flexibility and more choices when running their Intel-powered infrastructure within the AWS cloud. Today’s news is a further continuation of Intel and AWS’ close collaboration, giving customers scalable compute instances in the cloud for almost 15 years.

“Our latest 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors are our highest performance data center CPU and provide AWS customers an excellent platform to run their most critical business applications. We look forward to continuing our long-term collaboration with AWS to deploy industry-leading technologies within AWS’ cloud infrastructure,” says Sandra Rivera, Intel executive vice president and general manager, Datacenter and AI Group.

Intel Xeon processors are the most broadly deployed processor architecture within Amazon EC2 today, offering customers hundreds of different Intel-based EC2 instance options across 80 availability zones within 25 geographical regions. The extensive availability gives customers the consistency and reliability needed to power their critical business applications around the world. In addition to being the most broadly deployed compute architecture, Intel Xeon processors are supported by the industry’s broadest ecosystem of data center software to help accelerate customer deployments.

EC2 M6i instances deliver up to a 15% better price performance compared with M5 instances. These instances are ideal for workloads such as back-end servers supporting enterprise applications like Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint, SAP Business Suite, MySQL, Microsoft SQL server, PostgreSQL databases, gaming servers and caching fleets, as well as for application development environments.  

The Amazon EC2 M6i instances are the highest performance Intel-based Amazon EC2 instances. They support up to 128 virtual central processing units (vCPUs) per instance, with a 4:1 ratio of memory to vCPU. The M6i instances support up to 40 gigabits per second (Gbps) bandwidth to Amazon Elastic Block Store in the largest size, and up to 10 Gbps in the four smallest sizes, which is more than double that of the previous-generation M5 instances. The M6i instances also support up to 50 Gbps networking, which is twice that of M5 instances.

Customers can also enable Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) on the 32xlarge size of M6i. These instances also provide up to 20% higher memory bandwidth per vCPU compared with M5 instances, allowing customers to efficiently perform real-time analysis for data-intensive artificial intelligence/machine learning, gaming and high performance computing applications.

The 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors powering the M6i instances provide customers greater total cost of ownership than M5 instances by offering higher per-core performance, built-in artificial intelligence acceleration with Intel® DL Boost, and built-in crypto acceleration. In addition to higher workload performance, 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors are designed to be reliable at scale and are uniquely validated and tested at cluster-level scale. These unique features help to power a diverse range of expanding cloud workloads.

M6i instances are SAP-certified. For over eight years SAP customers have been relying on the Amazon EC2 M-family of instances for their mission-critical SAP workloads. With M6i instances customers can achieve up to 15% better price performance from M5i for SAP applications.

“AWS and Intel have a long-standing relationship dedicated to developing, building and supporting cloud services that are designed to meet current and future computing requirements for our customers,” said Dave Brown, vice president, Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) at Amazon. “These new Amazon EC2 M6i instances powered by the latest Intel® technology provide customers with choice, flexibility and higher performance, and are an ideal solution for customers looking to run their general-purpose applications on Intel architecture.”

The M6i instances are available in six regions worldwide: U.S. East (Northern Virginia, Ohio), U.S. West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt, Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Singapore). The M6i instances are available for purchase with on-demand, with savings plans, as standard reserved instances or convertible reserved instances, as spot instances, or as dedicated instances or dedicated hosts.