Amazon EC2 C5 Instances

Designed for compute-intensive workloads with cost-effective high performance

Amazon EC2 C5 instances deliver cost-effective high performance at a low price per compute ratio for running advanced compute-intensive workloads. This includes workloads such as high-performance web servers, high-performance computing (HPC), batch processing, ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, video encoding, scientific modelling, distributed analytics and machine/deep learning inference. The C5 instances are available with a choice of processors from Intel and AMD.

Amazon EC2 C5a and C5ad Instances Now Available

C5a and C5ad instances are powered by custom 2nd generation up to 3.3 GHz AMD EPYC processors and provide additional options to help customers optimize both cost and performance for a variety of compute intensive workloads. The C5ad instances have local NVMe storage for workloads that require very low latency and storage access with high random read and write IOPS ability.

Bare metal variants, C5an.metal and C5adn.metal, are coming soon.

Features

Multiple processor choices

C5 and C5d instances offer a choice of processors based on the size of the instance. The C5 and C5d 12xlarge, 24xlarge, and metal instances feature custom 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Cascade Lake) with a sustained all-core turbo frequency of 3.6GHz and maximum single core turbo frequency of 3.9GHz. The other C5 and C5d instance sizes will either launch on the 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processor or the 1st generation Intel Xeon Platinum 8000 series (Skylake-SP) processor with a sustained all core Turbo frequency of up to 3.4GHz, and single core turbo up to 3.5 GHz using Intel Turbo Boost Technology. C5 instances provide support for the new Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (AVX-512) instruction set, offering up to 2x the FLOPS per core per cycle compared to the previous generation C4 instances. The C5 and C5d 12xlarge, 24xlarge, and metal instance sizes enable Vector Neural Network Instructions (AVX-512 VNNI*) which will help speed up typical machine learning operations like convolution, and automatically improve inference performance over a wide range of deep learning workloads.

C5a instances feature custom 2nd generation up to 3.3 GHz AMD EPYC 7002 series processors built on a 7nm process node for increased efficiency. C5a instances deliver leading x86 price-performance through a combination of high performance processing and 10% lower cost.

High performance networking

C5n instances leverage the fourth generation of custom Nitro card and Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) device to deliver 100 Gbps of network throughput to a single instance. These instances are ideal for network intensive applications, including HPC workloads, data lake and analytics software, and network appliances. C5n.9xlarge and 18xlarge instances support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), to run tightly-coupled HPC applications at scale.

High performance storage

Local NVMe-based SSD block level storage physically connected to the host server is available on C5d and C5ad instances. These instances are a great fit for applications that need access to high-speed, low latency local storage like video encoding, image manipulation and other forms of media processing. It will also benefit applications that need temporary storage of data, such as batch and log processing and applications that need caches and scratch files.

Built on the AWS Nitro System

The AWS Nitro System is a rich collection of building blocks that offloads many of the traditional virtualization functions to dedicated hardware and software to deliver high performance, high availability, and high security while also reducing virtualization overhead.

*VNNI may not be compatible with all Linux distributions. Please check documentation before using.

Product Details

  • C5
  • C5 and C5d instances feature either the 1st or 2nd generation Intel Xeon Platinum 8000 series processor (Skylake-SP or Cascade Lake) with a sustained all core Turbo CPU clock speed of up to 3.6 GHz. The new C5 and C5d 12xlarge, 24xlarge, and metal instance sizes feature the 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Cascade Lake) with a sustained all-core Turbo CPU frequency of 3.6GHz. These instances provide up to 25 Gbps of network bandwidth and up to 19 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth to Amazon EBS. With C5d instances, local NVMe-based SSDs are physically connected to the host server and provide block-level storage that is coupled to the lifetime of the instance.

    Model vCPU Memory (GiB) Instance Storage (GB) Network Bandwidth (Gbps)
    EBS Bandwidth (Mbps)
    c5.large 2 4 EBS-Only Up to 10 Up to 4,750
    c5.xlarge 4 8 EBS-Only Up to 10 Up to 4,750
    c5.2xlarge 8 16 EBS-Only Up to 10 Up to 4,750
    c5.4xlarge 16 32 EBS-Only Up to 10 4,750
    c5.9xlarge 36 72 EBS-Only 10 9,500
    c5.12xlarge 48 96 EBS-Only 12 9,500
    c5.18xlarge 72 144 EBS-Only 25 19,000
    c5.24xlarge 96 192 EBS-Only 25 19,000
    c5.metal 96 192 EBS-Only 25 19,000
    c5d.large 2 4 1 x 50 NVMe SSD Up to 10 Up to 4,750
    c5d.xlarge 4 8 1 x 100 NVMe SSD Up to 10 Up to 4,750
    c5d.2xlarge 8 16 1 x 200 NVMe SSD Up to 10 Up to 4,750
    c5d.4xlarge 16 32 1 x 400 NVMe SSD Up to 10 4,750
    c5d.9xlarge 36 72 1 x 900 NVMe SSD 10 9,500
    c5d.12xlarge 48 96 2 x 900 NVMe SSD 12 9,500
    c5d.18xlarge 72 144 2 x 900 NVMe SSD 25 19,000
    c5d.24xlarge 96 192 4 x 900 NVMe SSD 25 19,000
    c5d.metal 96 192 4 x 900 NVMe SSD 25 19,000
  • C5n
  • C5n instances feature the Intel Xeon Platinum 8000 series (Skylake-SP) processor with a sustained all core Turbo CPU clock speed of up to 3.5 GHz. C5n instances provide up to 100 Gbps of network bandwidth and up to 19 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth to Amazon EBS. C5n instances also feature 33% higher memory footprint compared to C5 instances. C5n.18xlarge instances support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) to run tightly-coupled HPC applications at scale on AWS.

    Model vCPU Memory (GiB) Instance Storage (GB) Network Bandwidth (Gbps)
    EBS Bandwidth (Mbps)
    c5n.large 2 5.25 EBS-Only Up to 25
    Up to 4,750
    c5n.xlarge 4 10.5 EBS-Only Up to 25 Up to 4,750
    c5n.2xlarge 8 21 EBS-Only Up to 25 Up to 4,750
    c5n.4xlarge 16 42 EBS-Only Up to 25 4,750
    c5n.9xlarge 36 96
    EBS-Only 50 9,500
    c5n.18xlarge 72 192 EBS-Only 100 19,000
    c5n.metal 72 192 EBS-Only 100 19,000
  • C5a
  • C5a and C5ad instances offer leading x86 price/performance for a broad set of compute-intensive workloads and feature 2nd generation 3.3GHz AMD EPYC 7002 series processors built on a 7nm process node for increased efficiency. C5a and C5ad instances provide up to 20 Gbps of network bandwidth and 9.5 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth to Amazon EBS. With C5ad instances, local NVMe-based SSDs are physically connected to the host server and provide block-level storage that is coupled to the lifetime of the instance.

    Model vCPU Memory (GiB)
    Instance Storage (GB)
    Network Bandwidth (Gbps)
    EBS Bandwidth (Mbps)
    c5a.large 2 4 EBS-Only Up to 10 Up to 3,170
    c5a.xlarge 4 8 EBS-Only Up to 10 Up to 3,170
    c5a.2xlarge 8 16 EBS-Only Up to 10 Up to 3,170
    c5a.4xlarge 16 32 EBS-Only Up to 10 Up to 3,170
    c5a.8xlarge 32 64 EBS-Only 10 3,170
    c5a.12xlarge 48 96 EBS-Only 12 4,750
    c5a.16xlarge 64 128 EBS-Only 20 6,300
    c5a.24xlarge 96 192 EBS-Only 20 9,500
    c5ad.large 2 4 1 x 75 NVMe SSD
    Up to 10 Up to 3,170
    c5ad.xlarge 4 8 1 x 150 NVMe SSD Up to 10 Up to 3,170
    c5ad.2xlarge 8 16 1 x 300 NVMe SSD Up to 10 Up to 3,170
    c5ad.4xlarge 16 32 2 x 300 NVMe SSD Up to 10 Up to 3,170
    c5ad.8xlarge 32 64 2 x 600 NVMe SSD 10 3,170
    c5ad.12xlarge 48 96 2 x 900 NVMe SSD 12 4,750
    c5ad.16xlarge 64 128 2 x 1200 NVMe SSD 20 6,300
    c5ad.24xlarge 96 192 2 x 1900 NVMe SSD 20 9,500

Customer stories

Rescale enables customers in the aerospace, automotive, life sciences and energy sectors to run utility supercomputers using the AWS cloud. Ryan Kaneshiro, Chief Architect at Rescale, said, "C5 fully supports NVMe and is ideal for the I/O intensive HPC workloads seen on Rescale's ScaleX® platform. Along with C5's higher clock rate, we look forward to our customers experiencing a significant performance increase vs. C4."
iPromote provides digital advertising solutions to 40,000 small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Matt Silva, COO at iPromote, said, “iPromote processes billions of ad serving bid transactions every day. During testing, EC2’s C5 instances improved our application’s request execution time by over 50-percent when compared to our existing C4 instances. The new C5 instances concretely improved our network performance.”
“With the support for AVX-512, the new c5.18xlarge instance provides a 200 percent improvement in FLOPS compared to the largest C4 instance,” said Wil Mayers, Director of Research and Development for Alces. “This will reduce the execution time of the scientific models that our customers run on the Alces Flight platform. The larger c5.18xlarge size with 72 vCPUs reduces the number of instances in the cluster, and has a direct benefit for our user base on both price and performance dimensions.”
Grail is a life sciences company whose mission is to detect cancer early, when it can be cured. “Our platform processes a huge amount of DNA sequencing data to detect faint tumor DNA signals in a sea of background noise,” said Cos Nicolaou, Head of Technology at Grail. “We are eager to migrate onto the AVX-512 enabled c5.18xlarge instance size. With this change, we expect to decrease the processing time of some of our key workloads by more than 30 percent.”

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