Amazon Web Services (AWS) has teamed up with Intel to announce the eighth generation of memory-optimized EC2 instances: the R8i and R8i-flex. These new instance types run on specially developed Intel Xeon 6 processors with DDR5 7200 MT/s memory.
According to AWS, they deliver the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth of any comparable Intel processors in the cloud. For Intel, which has been under considerable pressure in recent weeks, this is a welcome boost: the world’s largest cloud provider has explicitly chosen customized Xeons.
The R8i instances scale up to 96xlarge with up to 384 vCPUs and 3 terabytes of memory. According to The Register, this corresponds to servers with two 96-core Xeon 6 chips, with each physical core delivering two vCPUs. AWS emphasizes that these are custom variants, but does not share details about the specific changes.
The fact that AWS is highlighting this collaboration is an important signal that Intel can still compete in the hyperscale cloud market, according to The Register, where competitors such as AMD and Arm have made significant gains in recent years. The fact that AWS is once again opting for customized Xeons shows that Intel still knows how to offer unique value for specific workloads.
20 percent more computing power
The new generation offers up to 20 percent more computing power, 2.5 times higher memory throughput, and 15 percent better price-performance than the R7i instances. Specific workloads benefit even more: PostgreSQL databases run up to 30 percent faster, NGINX web applications up to 60 percent faster, and AI deep learning models up to 40 percent faster. Customers can also adjust the bandwidth distribution between the network and EBS, further improving database and logging performance.
AWS sees the R8i instances as a solution for business-critical, memory-intensive workloads such as SAP HANA, SQL and NoSQL databases, in-memory caches, and big data analytics with Apache Hadoop and Spark. For less intensive applications, there are the lower-cost R8i Flex instances, which offer a 5% lower price and better price-performance. The new instance types are available immediately in the US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Spain) regions.