Now Available: New C5 instance sizes and bare metal instances

Amazon EC2 C5 instances are very popular for running compute-heavy workloads like batch processing, distributed analytics, high-performance computing, machine/deep learning inference, ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding.

Today, we are happy to expand the Amazon EC2 C5 family with:

• New larger virtualized instance sizes: 12xlarge and 24xlarge,
• A bare metal option.

The new C5 instance sizes run on Intel’s Second Generation Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Cascade Lake) with sustained all-core turbo frequency of 3.6GHz and maximum single core turbo frequency of 3.9GHz.

The new processors also enable a new feature called Intel Deep Learning Boost, a capability based on the AVX-512 instruction set. Thanks to the new Vector Neural Network Instructions (AVX-512 VNNI), deep learning frameworks will speed up typical machine learning operations like convolution, and automatically improve inference performance over a wide range of workloads.

These instances are also based on the AWS Nitro System, with dedicated hardware accelerators for EBS processing (including crypto operations), the software-defined network inside of each Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), and ENA networking.

New C5 instance sizes: 12xlarge and 24xlarge

Previously, the largest C5 instance available was C5.18xlarge, with 72 logical processors and 144 GiB of memory. As you can see, the new 24xlarge size increases available resources by 33%, in order to scale up and reduce the time required to compute intensive tasks.

Bare metal C5

Just like for existing bare metal instances (M5, M5d, R5, R5d, z1d, and so forth), your operating system runs directly on the underlying hardware with direct access to the processor.

As described in a previous blog post, you can leverage bare metal instances for applications that:

• do not want to take the performance hit of nested virtualization,
• need access to physical resources and low-level hardware features, such as performance counters and Intel VT that are not always available or fully supported in virtualized environments,
• are intended to run directly on the hardware, or licensed and supported for use in non-virtualized environments.

Bare metal instances can also take advantage of Elastic Load Balancing, Auto Scaling, Amazon CloudWatch, and other AWS services.

Now Available!

You can start using these new instances today in the following regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (London), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Paris), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and AWS GovCloud (US-West).

Please send us feedback and help us build the next generation of compute-optimized instances.

— Julien;