Intel has apparently produced a unique chip for AWS servers. The Xeon processor in question has 96 cores and 192 threads, considerably more than the 60 cores and 120 threads on the top-of-the-line Xeon Platinum 8490H.
AWS talks about Intel Xeons being available “exclusively” on its own servers. There are nine sizes available for M7i instances, starting from 2 virtual CPUs and 8GB of memory all the way up to 192 vCPUs and 768GB of RAM.
The instance running on the top-end chip is known as m7i.48xlarge. In addition to the significant core count, AWS boasts of a performance uplift of up to 15 percent compared to Intel processors from other cloud providers.
There are two variants of M7i, of which M7i-Flex instances are suitable for applications that do not use all computing resources. AWS lists Web and application servers, virtual desktops, batch processing, microservices, databases and enterprise applications as possible uses.
Customers looking to deploy large application servers and databases, gaming servers, CPU-based machine learning and video streaming can turn to “big” M7i instances.
Competing with AMD
Since AMD’s resurgence with Ryzen, Threadripper and Epyc starting in 2017, that company typically uses more cores than Intel on similar chips, especially when it comes to server CPUs. For example, AMD democratized six cores for midrange desktops and laptops, while Threadripper and Epyc for workstations and servers, respectively, expanded the expected core counts tremendously. A custom Xeon with as many cores as the top-end Epyc processor would be a major turning point in this regard.
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