Amazon EC2 C7i and C7i-flex instances

C7i-flex instances offer the easiest way to optimize costs for a majority of compute-intensive workloads. They deliver up to 19% better price performance compared to C6i instances. C7i instances offer 15% better price performance compared to C6i instances. C7i provides additional larger instance sizes that enable consolidation and the ability to run more demanding and larger-sized workloads.

C7i-flex and C7i instances add to the broadest and deepest selection of EC2 instances on AWS. C7i-flex offers the 7 most common sizes from large to 16xlarge. C7i provides 11 sizes (including 2 bare-metal sizes: c7i.metal-24xl and c7i.metal-48xl) with varying amounts of vCPU,  memory, networking, and storage.

C7i-flex and C7i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor. Nitro delivers practically all the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances, for better overall performance and security. EC2 instances built on the Nitro System can deliver over 15% higher throughput performance on workloads versus other cloud providers running the same CPU.

C7i-flex and C7i instances are powered by custom 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.2 GHz (max core turbo frequency of 3.8 GHz). These custom processors are only available on AWS and offer the best performance among comparable Intel processors. Both instances include support for always-on memory encryption using Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME).

C7i-flex and C7i instances use DDR5 memory that provides higher bandwidth compared to C6i instances. C7i-flex instances support up to 10 Gbps bandwidth to Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) and up to 12.5 Gbps of networking bandwidth. C7i instances support up to 40 Gbps bandwidth to Amazon EBS and up to 50 Gbps of networking bandwidth. Additionally, with C7i you can attach up to 128 EBS volumes to an instance (compared to C6i which allowed up to 28 EBS volume attachments to an instance). C7i instances also support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) in the 48xlarge and metal-48xl sizes.

4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors offer 4 new built-in accelerators. Advance Matrix Extensions (AMX)—available on both C7i-flex and C7i instances—accelerate matrix multiplication operations for applications such as CPU-based ML. Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA), In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA), and QuickAssist Technology (QAT)—available only on C7i bare metal sizes—enable efficient offload and acceleration of data operations that help in optimizing performance for databases, encryption and compression, and queue management workloads.

The AWS Nitro System can be assembled in many different ways, allowing AWS to flexibly design and rapidly deliver EC2 instance types with an ever-broadening selection of compute, storage, memory, and networking options. Nitro Cards offload and accelerate I/O for functions, increasing overall system performance.