Introducing Amazon EC2 C6i instances
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of compute optimized Amazon EC2 C6i instances. C6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better compute price performance over C5 instances for a wide variety of workloads, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME). Designed for compute-intensive workloads, C6i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances. These instances are an ideal fit for compute-intensive workloads such as batch processing, distributed analytics, high performance computing (HPC), ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of compute optimized Amazon EC2 C6i instances. C6i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, offer up to 15% better compute price performance over C5 instances for a wide variety of workloads, and always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME). Designed for compute-intensive workloads, C6i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances. These instances are an ideal fit for compute-intensive workloads such as batch processing, distributed analytics, high performance computing (HPC), ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding.
To meet customer demands for increased scalability, C6i instances provide a new instance size (c6i.32xlarge) with 128 vCPUs and 256 GiB of memory, 33% more than the largest C5 instance. They also provide up to 9% higher memory bandwidth per vCPU compared to C5 instances. C6i also give customers up to 50 Gbps of networking speed and 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store, twice that of C5 instances. Customers can use Elastic Fabric Adapter on the 32xlarge size, which enables low latency and highly scalable inter-node communication. For optimal networking performance on these new instances, Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) driver update may be required. For more information on optimal ENA driver for c6i, see this article.
These instances are generally available today in AWS US East (Northern Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) Regions. C6i instances are available in 9 sizes with 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 48, 64, 96, and 128 vCPUs. Customers can purchase the new instances via Savings Plans, Reserved, On-Demand, and Spot instances. To get started, visit the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. To learn more, visit the C6i instances page.