AWS Still Cares Enough About Intel To Order Up A Fresh Batch Of Custom Xeons

Amazon Web Services has revealed it’s started running some custom cuts of Intel’s Xeon 6 processors.

The cloud colossus on Tuesday announced two new instance types – the R8i and R8i-flex – that it says “deliver the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud.”

AWS’s instance type listing states that R8i and R8i-flex both feature “DDR5 7200MT/s memory” and operate at “up to 3.9 GHz all-core turbo frequency” but offer no other details about any tweaks to the Xeon 6.

The R8i comes in variants from two to 384 vCPUs. Intel offers many Xeon 6 variants with 96 cores, which we mention as AWS counts a vCPU as one thread on an x86 processor. A single 96-core CPU therefore offers 192 EC2 vCPUs, and a two socket-server provides 384 – matching the mightiest of the R8* instance types.

The instances also allow users to vary bandwidth configuration so it’s allocated differently between network access and connections to Amazon’s elastic block store. Doing so can apparently improve database performance.

AWS recommends its new rent-a-servers for memory intensive workloads including SQL and NoSQL databases, distributed web scale in-memory caches such as Memcached or Redis), SAP HANA, and big data tools like Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark clusters).

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Hyperscale clouds often run custom CPUs. Oracle has boasted of running Xeons that include a few more cores than Intel sells to other customers, and of slightly faster chips that include the ability to turn off unwanted cores.

AWS has previously promoted custom Xeons that it says give it an edge.

Whatever makes these new Xeons special, AWS revealing it’s acquired them – and sees promoting superior x86 performance as something its customers will appreciate – is good news for Intel as in these cloudy times hyperscalers are a key customer for any chipmaker. ®