AWS to Offer Fourth-Generation AMD EPYC Processor-Based Amazon EC2 Instances

By Kelly Woods, Sr. Product Marketing Manager – AWS

As customers look to innovate with the cloud, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is focused on helping organizations grow by enabling them to securely run a wide range of applications with price performance benefits.

AWS offers the broadest and deepest set of cloud capabilities and continually innovates across infrastructure and services to help customers build, run, and scale applications in the cloud, on premises, and at the edge. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides customers the most choice for compute instances so they can tailor the infrastructure to their business needs and workloads.

AMD-powered instances are integral to these offerings, and with AMD’s announcement of fourth-generation AMD EPYC processors AWS plans to offer Amazon EC2 instances powered by the newly-introduced processors. These instances will expand customer choice of compute options available on EC2, and take advantage of the higher performance and value of fourth-generation AMD EPYC processors.

When combined with the AWS Nitro System, the underlying platform for our next-generation of EC2 instances that enables AWS to innovate faster, customers get price performance and security benefits.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is an AWS Partner that manufactures and markets semiconductor solutions that meet the requirements of client, mobile, server, and embedded applications (IoT).

AMD + AWS

AWS was the first to offer AMD EPYC processors in the cloud in November of 2018, providing customers additional infrastructure choice and x86 application compatibility at 10% lower cost than comparable x86 instances.

As customers observed cost savings, they requested additional instance types based on AMD EPYC processors to run a broader set of workloads. AWS added high speed, low latency, local block storage to the AMD-based EC2 instance portfolio, introduced compute-optimized instances based on second-generation AMD EPYC processors, and launched graphics-optimized instances.

With third-generation AMD EPYC processors, AWS introduced general-purpose Amazon EC2 M6a, compute-optimized Amazon EC2 C6a, and memory-optimized Amazon EC2 R6a instances, delivering up to 35% better price performance over the previous generation M5a, C5a, and R5a instances. And, AWS launched Amazon EC2 Hpc6a instances delivering up to 65% better price performance over comparable compute-optimized x86-based instances.

To date, AWS has introduced over 100 Amazon EC2 instances across 24 global regions using AMD EPYC processors.

Customer Use Cases: TrueCar, Sprinklr

TrueCar is an automotive digital marketplace founded in 2005. In a fast-moving industry with a quickly changing landscape, TrueCar sought ways to operate more efficiently, thereby freeing up money saved to reinvest in the automotive marketplace.

As part of an overall effort to increase development velocity and its ability to respond to change, TrueCar evaluated and optimized its AWS Cloud infrastructure by choosing AMD processor-based Amazon EC2 instances in the T3a, M6a, and C6a instance families.

“Thanks to Amazon EC2 instances powered by AMD EPYC CPUs, we saved money and freed up time for our engineers to innovate on the car shopping experience for our customers,” said Joshua Go, VP of Infrastructure Engineering at TrueCar.

Sprinklr is a web platform for businesses offering a product suite for customer-facing functions including customer care, research, sales, advertising, and engagement. With the scale at which Sprinklr operates, it has to optimize its robust architecture for cost and performance. With Amazon EC2 M6a for its Jenkins workloads, Sprinklr saw 22% faster performance and 24% cost savings over EC2 M5a instances.

Summary

At AWS, we are constantly innovating on behalf of our customers with workload-optimized infrastructure for virtually every application at the best price performance. Amazon EC2 gives customers the most options for compute so they can tailor the infrastructure to their business needs, and AMD is integral to these offerings.

With the launch of fourth-generation AMD EPYC processors, AWS plans to add these processors to our growing portfolio of AMD EPYC processor-based EC2 instances.