Amazon Web Services (AWS) has collaborated with Intel to deploy the Intel Xeon Scalable CPUs in its recently announced C5 instances, the next generation of compute optimized instances for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).
The Intel Xeon Scalable processors, designed for growing cloud data center infrastructure will offer AWS customers the disruptive performance efficiency across a wide range of cloud workloads when they go for Amazon EC2 C5 instances.
Amazon EC2 C5 instances are designed for compute-heavy applications including batch processing, distributed analytics, high-performance computing (HPC), multiplayer gaming etc. and Intel’s 3.0 GHz Xeon Scalable processors will address all the needs. Intel XS processors are highly agile compute engines and enable public cloud environments to flawlessly transition among HPC and AI/deep learning compute engines.
“Customers have been happily using Amazon EC2’s unmatched selection of instances for more than 11 years, yet they’ll always take higher and more consistent performance if it could be offered in a cost-effective way. One of the challenges in taking this next step is how to leverage the cost efficiency of virtualization while consuming hardly any overhead for it,” said Matt Garman, Vice President, Amazon EC2, AWS. “We’ve been working on an innovative way to do this that comes to fruition with Amazon EC2 C5 instances. Equipped with our new cloud-optimized hypervisor, C5 instances set a new standard for consistent, high-performance cloud computing, eliminating practically any virtualization overhead through custom AWS hardware, and delivering a 25 percent improvement in compute price-performance over C4 instances—with some customers reporting improvements of well over 50 percent.”
The EC2 C5 instances feature up to 72 vCPUs (which is twice compared to C4 instances), a base clock frequency of 3.0 GHZ and 144 GiB of memory to run the most demanding HPC workloads. Customers will have energy efficiency and a system-level performance which is 1.65 times higher than the previous generation Xeon processors.
Intel’s Xeon processors integrate a number of architectural features in EC2 that speed up the efficiency of deep learning training 2.2 times, and deliver 2.4 times higher deep learning inference performance.
The Xeon processors include Intel Advanced Vector Extensions-512 (Intel AVX-512) instructions that make the Amazon EC2 C5 instances the ideal solution for financial operations, scientific modelling, and distributed analytics.
Amazon EC2 C5 instances are now generally available in six sizes with 2, 4, 8, 16, 36, and 72 vCPUs in US East, US West, EU regions, with support of additional regions coming soon. It can be purchased On-demand, Reserved, or Spot instances.
