New – Seventh Generation Memory-optimized Amazon EC2 Instances (R7i)

Earlier, we introduced a duo of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances to our lineup: the general-purpose Amazon EC2 M7i instances and the compute-optimized Amazon EC2 C7i instances.

Today, I’m happy to share that we’re expanding these seventh-generation x86-based offerings to include memory-optimized Amazon EC2 R7i instances. These instances are powered by custom 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Sapphire Rapids) exclusive to AWS and will offer the highest compute performance among the comparable fourth-generation Intel processors in the cloud. The R7i instances are available in eleven sizes including two bare metal sizes (coming soon), and offer 15 percent improvement in price-performance compared to Amazon EC2 R6i instances.

Amazon EC2 R7i instances are SAP Certified and are an ideal fit for memory-intensive workloads such as high-performance databases (SQL and NoSQL databases), distributed web scale in-memory caches (Memcached and Redis), in-memory databases (SAP HANA), real-time big data analytics (Apache Hadoop and Spark clusters) and other enterprise applications. Amazon EC2 R7i offers larger instance sizes (48xlarge) with up to 192 vCPUs and 1,536 GiB of memory, including both virtual and bare metal instances, enabling you to consolidate your workloads and scale-up applications.

You can attach up to 128 EBS volumes to each R7i instance; by way of comparison, the R6i instances allow you to attach up to 28 volumes.

Here are the specs for the R7i instances:

We’re also getting ready to launch two sizes of bare metal R7i instances soon:

Built-in Accelerators
The Sapphire Rapids processors include four built-in accelerators, each providing hardware acceleration for a specific workload:

• Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) – The AMX extensions are designed to accelerate machine learning and other compute-intensive workloads that involve matrix operations. It improves the efficiency of these operations by providing specialized hardware instructions and registers tailored for matrix computations. Matrix operations, such as multiplication and convolution, are fundamental building blocks in various computational tasks, especially in machine learning algorithms.
• Intel Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) – DSA enhances data processing and analytics capabilities for a wide range of applications and enables developers to harness the full potential of their data-driven workloads. With DSA, you gain access to optimized hardware acceleration that delivers exceptional performance for data-intensive tasks.
• Intel In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA) – This accelerator runs database and analytic workloads faster, with the potential for greater power efficiency. In-memory compression, decompression, encryption at very high throughput, and a suite of analytics primitives support in-memory databases, open-source databases, and data stores like RocksDB and ClickHouse.
• Intel QuickAssist Technology (QAT) – This accelerator offloads encryption, decryption, and compression, freeing up processor cores and reducing power consumption. It also supports merged compression and encryption in a single data flow. To learn more start at the Intel QuickAssist Technology (Intel QAT) Overview.

Advanced Matrix Extensions are available on all sizes of R7i instances. The Intel QAT, Intel IAA, and Intel DSA accelerators will be available on the r7i.metal-24xl and r7i.metal-48xl instances.

Now Available
The new instances are available in the US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Spain), Europe (Stockholm), and Europe (Ireland) AWS Regions.

Purchasing Options
R7i instances are available in On-Demand, Reserved, Savings Plan, and Spot Instance form. R7i instances are also available in Dedicated Host and Dedicated Instance form.

— Irshad