In The Works – New AMD-Powered, Compute-Optimized EC2 Instances (C5a/C5ad)

We’re getting ready to give you even more power and even more choices when it comes to EC2 instances.

We will soon launch C5a and C5ad instances powered by custom second-generation AMD EPYC “Rome” processors running at frequencies as high as 3.3 GHz. You will be able to use these compute-optimized instances to run your batch processing, distributed analytics, web applications and other compute-intensive workloads. Like the existing AMD-powered instances in the M, R and T families, the C5a and C5ad instances are built on the AWS Nitro System and give you an opportunity to balance your instance mix based on cost and performance.

The instances will be available in eight sizes and also in bare metal form, with up to 192 vCPUs and 384 GiB of memory. The C5ad instances will include up to 7.6 TiB of fast, local NVMe storage, making them perfect for video encoding, image manipulation, and other media processing workloads.

The bare metal instances (c5an.metal and c5adn.metal) will offer twice as much memory and double the vCPU count of comparable instances, making them some of the largest and most powerful compute-optimized instances yet. The bare metal variants will have access to 100 Gbps of network bandwidth and will be compatible with Elastic Fabric Adapter — perfect for your most demanding HPC workloads!

I’ll have more information soon, so stay tuned!

— Jeff;