AWS rolls out AMD-powered EC2 instances for compute-intensive workloads
Amazon Web Services on Monday rolled out the new compute-optimized Amazon EC2 C6a instances, powered By 3rd Gen AMD EPYC (known as "Milan") processors. The instances are best-suited for compute-intensive workloads, such as high-performance web servers, batch processing, ad serving, ML, multi-player gaming, video encoding and scientific modeling.
The new instances offer up to 15% improvement in price-performance versus Amazon's C5a instances, the company says, and a 10% lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances. Available in 10 sizes, they also provide up to 40Gbps for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and up to 50Gbps for network bandwidth.
C6a instances feature always-on memory encryption with AMD Transparent Single Key Memory Encryption (TSME) and support new AVX2 instructions for accelerating encryption and decryption algorithms.
Just last month, AWS released Hpc6a instances, featuring AMD Milan chips, for HPC workloads. Back in November, the company announced the GA of Milan-powered M6a instances for general-purpose workloads.
The widespread adoption of AMD's EPYC processor contributed to AMD's strong 2021 results. The company reported earlier this month that it had record annual revenue and profitability in 2021, thanks in part to data center revenues doubling.
Meanwhile, Google last week announced its own Milan-powered cloud instance for performance-intensive workloads.
The widespread adoption of AMD's EPYC processor contributed to AMD's strong 2021 results. The company reported earlier this month that it had record annual revenue and profitability in 2021, thanks in part to data center revenues doubling.
Amazon's C6a instances are available now in three AWS regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland).