I4i instances deliver up to 30% better compute price performance than I3 instances. I4i instances also offer a new size with up to 128 vCPUs and 1,024 GiB of memory, which is twice the size of the largest I3 instance. The higher instance size lets you to consolidate workloads on fewer instances and save on per core licensing costs.

While some SSD-based instances are created to achieve high results for benchmark tests that may not represent real workloads, I4i instances are designed to increase the number of transactions that can be processed per second (TPS). This allows you to meet or exceed application service level agreements (SLAs) and deliver higher performance to end-users.

I4i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances for better overall performance and security.

I4i instances are powered by 3rd generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz, and include support for always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME).  

I4i instances support 40 Gbps bandwidth to Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) in the largest size and up to 10 Gbps in the four smallest sizes, which is twice that of I3 instances. I4i instances also support up to 75 Gbps networking bandwidth, which is three times more than I3 instances.

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.