AMD EPYC Powers Amazon EC2 C6a HPC Instance

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AMD announced the expansion of Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) AMD EPYC processor-based offerings with the general availability of compute optimized Amazon EC2 C6a instances. According to AWS, the C6a instances offer up to 15% better compute price performance over previous generation C5a instances for a variety of compute focused workloads.

The C6a instances support compute-intensive workloads such as batch processing, distributed analytics, ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding. This is the second AWS EC2 instance type powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, following the release of the M6a instances. These instances continue the collaboration between AWS and AMD providing AWS EC2 customers access to the performance and price performance capabilities of the latest generation of AMD EPYC processors.

“AMD EPYC processors continue to offer a crucial solution for AWS customers that need access to powerful compute performance and cloud scalability for their workloads,” said Dan McNamara, senior vice president and general manager, Server Business, AMD. “Our expanding portfolio of next-generation, cloud solutions powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors for AWS underscores the growing adoption of AMD technology in the cloud and we’re excited to continue our work together.”

“Amazon EC2 C6a instances, powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, continue our collaboration with AMD, providing customers the ability to run compute intensive workloads,” said David Brown, Vice President, Amazon EC2, AWS. “C6a instances deliver on AWS’s history of offering the latest AMD EPYC processors while enabling the best price and performance for AWS customers.”

The C6a instances take advantages of AMD EPYC processor features including:

  • High core density – this enables up to two large instances sizes, 128 vCPUs and 192 vCPUs, the largest with 284 GB of memory, twice the size of the largest C5a instances
  • Always on hardware security -encrypts main memory to help protect the data sitting in the physical memory,
  • Compute Focused Performance – utilizing the ‘Zen 3’ core, the C6a instances enable up to 15 percent better price performance compared to the previous generation C5a instances
  • Networking / Bandwidth – C6a instances deliver up to 50 Gbps of networking speed and 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store, more than twice that of C5a instances.
  • C6a instances are generally available today in AWS US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) Regions, offer a variety of sizes including 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 48, 64, 96, 128, and 192 vCPUs, and utilize Elastic Fabric Adapter on the 48x large size for low latency and highly scalable inter-node communication. AWS customers can visit the C6a instances page to get started.