AMD EPYC Processor Offerings Continue to Grow at AWS With New Instances for General Purpose Compute


AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) announced Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) has expanded its AMD EPYC processor-based offerings with the general availability of general-purpose Amazon EC2 M6a instances. The M6a instances are powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors delivering, according to AWS, up to 35% better price-performance compared to the previous M5a instances and a 10% lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances.

“Our 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors provide Amazon EC2 users excellent scalability and impressive price-performance compared to previous generation Amazon EC2 M5a instances. This announcement shows our strong collaboration as well as highlights our overall momentum in cloud infrastructure,” said Lynn Comp, corporate vice president, Cloud Business, AMD. “Our work with AWS exemplifies our commitment to giving end users innovation and performance for their cloud environments and workloads.”

“Amazon EC2 M6a instances, powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, are designed to provide our customers with a balance of compute, memory, storage, and network resources and deliver up to 35% better price performance than the previous generation M5a instances,” said David Brown, vice president, Amazon EC2, AWS. “Our continued collaboration with AMD enables AWS to meet customer demand and provide our users with flexibility, scalability, and compelling performance and price-performance for their general-purpose workloads.”

The Amazon EC2 M6a instances are the first EC2 instances powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs, which are to be followed by additional instances going forward. Compared to the existing M5a instances, M6a takes advantage of the new ‘Zen 3’ core for better price-performance, and more core density to meet customer demands for increased scalability.

The M6a instances are also:

  • SAP-Certified and ideal for workloads such as web and application servers, back-end servers supporting enterprise applications, micro-services, multi-player gaming servers, caching fleets, as well as for application development environments.
  • Available in ten sizes, with two more instance sizes than M5a (32xlarge and 48xlarge). The 48xlarge size has up to 192 vCPUs and 768 GiB of memory, which is twice that of the largest M5a instance.
  • Available with up to 50 Gbps networking bandwidth, and 40 Gbps to the Amazon Elastic Block Store, which is more than twice that of M5a instances
  • Built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers nearly all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to the instances.

The latest AWS M6a instances powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors are available today in AWS US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Mumbai) Regions. AWS customers can visit the M6a instances landing page to get started.