New – Amazon EC2 C6i Instances Powered by the Latest Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors
We recently introduced Amazon EC2 M6i instances powered by the latest generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, which offer customers up to 15% improvement in price performance compared to M5 instances.
Today, I am happy to announce the availability of the new compute-optimized Amazon EC2 C6i instances, which offer up to 15% improvement in price performance for a variety of workloads, versus comparable C5 instances. These instances are ideal for running compute-intensive workloads such as batch processing, machine learning, high-end gaming, high performance computing (HPC) workloads, ad serving, and video encoding.
Compared to C5 instances using an Intel processor, this new instance type provides:
- Up to 15% improvement in compute price performance.
- Up to 9% higher memory bandwidth.
- Up to 40 Gbps for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and 50 Gbps for networking.
- Always-on memory encryption.
Like M6i, C6i instances are available in 9 sizes:
Name | vCPUs | Memory (GiB) |
Network Bandwidth (Gbps) |
EBS Throughput (Gbps) |
c6i.large | 2 | 4 | Up to 12.5 | Up to 10 |
c6i.xlarge | 4 | 8 | Up to 12.5 | Up to 10 |
c6i.2xlarge | 8 | 16 | Up to 12.5 | Up to 10 |
c6i.4xlarge | 16 | 32 | Up to 12.5 | Up to 10 |
c6i.8xlarge | 32 | 64 | 12.5 | 10 |
c6i.12xlarge | 48 | 96 | 18.75 | 15 |
c6i.16xlarge | 64 | 128 | 25 | 20 |
c6i.24xlarge | 96 | 192 | 37.5 | 30 |
c6i.32xlarge | 128 | 256 | 50 | 40 |
The new instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a collection of building blocks that offloads many of the traditional virtualization functions to dedicated hardware for high performance, high availability, and highly secure cloud instances.
As you should do with M6i instances, for optimal networking performance, upgrade your Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) drivers to version 3. For more information, see this article about migrating an EC2 instance to a sixth-generation instance in the AWS Knowledge Center.
C6i instances support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) on the c6i.32xlarge size for workloads that can benefit from lower network latency, such as HPC and video processing.
Available Now
C6i instances are available today in four AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland). As usual with EC2, you pay for what you use. For more information, see the EC2 pricing page.
To learn more, visit the EC2 C6i instance page. You can send feedback to the AWS forum for Amazon EC2 or through your usual AWS Support contacts.
— Channy