Posted On: Sep 14, 2023

AWS announces the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) C7i instances powered by custom 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Sapphire Rapids). These custom processors, available only on AWS, offer up to 15% better performance over comparable x86-based Intel processors utilized by other cloud providers.

C7i instances deliver up to 15% better price performance versus C6i instances. They are a great choice for all compute-intensive workloads, such as batch processing, distributed analytics, high performance computing (HPC), ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding. C7i instances offer larger instance sizes, up to 48xlarge, and the latest DDR5 memory. In addition, customers can now attach up to 128 EBS volumes to an C7i instance. By comparison, previous generation C6i instances allow up to 28 EBS volume attachments to an EC2 instance. With these features, you can process larger amounts of data, scale workloads, and improve performance over C6i instances. C7i instances support new Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) that accelerate matrix multiplication operations for applications such as CPU-based ML. C7i instances will also offer multiple bare-metal sizes (coming soon), for high-transaction and latency-sensitive workloads. C7i bare-metal sizes also support built-in Intel accelerators: Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA), In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA), and QuickAssist Technology (QAT). These accelerators are used to facilitate efficient offload and acceleration of data operations and optimize performance for workloads.

C7i instances are available in the following AWS Regions: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Spain), and Europe (Stockholm).

To learn more, visit Amazon EC2 C7i Instances.