Posted On: Nov 30, 2016
Amazon EC2 F1 is a compute instance with field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) that you can program to create custom hardware accelerations for your application. F1 instances are easy to program and come with everything you need to develop, simulate, debug, and compile your hardware acceleration code, including an FPGA Developer AMI and Hardware Developer Kit (HDK). Once your FPGA design is complete, you can register it as an Amazon FPGA Image (AFI), and deploy it to your F1 instance in just a few clicks. You can reuse your AFIs as many times, and across as many F1 instances as you like. You can offer AFIs you develop on the AWS Marketplace for other customers to purchase.
Amazon EC2 F1 instances are available in preview in two different instance sizes that include up to eight FPGAs per instance. F1 instances include the latest 16 nm Xilinx UltraScale Plus FPGA with local 64 GiB DDR4 ECC protected memory, with a dedicated PCI-e x16 connection to the instance. For F1.16xlarge instances, the dedicated PCI-e fabric lets the FPGAs share the same memory space and communicate with each other across the fabric at up to 12 GBps in each direction. The FPGAs within the F1.16xlarge share access to a 400 Gbps bidirectional ring for low-latency, high bandwidth communication.
F1 instances are in preview with the following specifications:
| Instance Type | vCPUs | Instance Memory (GiB) |
SSD Storage (GB) |
Enhanced Networking | EBS Optimized | FPGAs |
| f1.2xlarge | 8 | 122 | 480 | Yes | Yes | 1 |
| f1.16xlarge | 64 | 976 | 4 x 960 | Yes | Yes | 8 |
All F1 instances support Enhanced Networking and are EBS-Optimized at no additional cost. Just like other Amazon EC2 On-Demand Instances, you pay for F1 compute capacity by the hour with no long-term commitments or upfront payments. There is no charge for the FPGA Developer AMI or HDK, and you can program the FPGA on your F1 instance as many times as you like with no additional fees.
To learn more about F1, visit Amazon EC2 F1 Instances.