Intel is partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide infrastructure optimized for enterprise workloads that require high-performance computing and fast memory bandwidth.

Intel and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have officially launched 8th generation EC2 instances (R8i and R8i-Flex) based on the Intel® Xeon® 6 processor, kicking off a revolution in cloud infrastructure performance.

The Intel Xeon 6 processor is designed based on P-cores and provides the highest performance and fastest DDR5 memory bandwidth (up to 7,200 MT/s) among processors in its class.

AWS supports instances up to 96xlarge through this, creating an environment suitable for high-density workloads such as analytics, machine learning, and in-memory databases.

Intel has optimized the entire stack, from microarchitecture and firmware to hypervisor, virtualization, and software frameworks, to ensure customers can maximize the performance of Xeon 6 on AWS's global infrastructure.

AI performance has also been significantly improved. It has built-in Intel AMX (Advanced Matrix Extensions) to increase AI inference and machine learning processing speed by up to 2x, and can achieve high performance without external accelerators.

Additionally, Intel QuickAssist Technology (QAT) provides hardware-based encryption and compression capabilities to save CPU resources and increase workload efficiency in security-critical financial, healthcare, and public sectors.

“The new R8i instances deliver 2.5x the memory bandwidth and 15% better price-performance than the previous generation,” said Nishant Mehta, Vice President of Product Management for AWS EC2. “This is an innovative infrastructure that helps customers maximize performance while reducing costs.”

Global companies like Netflix and CrowdStrike are early adopters of Xeon 6-based instances to power AI-based cloud-native applications, and are seeing marked improvements in compute throughput and infrastructure efficiency.

“This EC2 instance launch is a significant milestone in the Intel-AWS collaboration,” said Ronak Singhal, Intel Senior Fellow. “Together, we’ve built an infrastructure that can maximize customer ROI through AI acceleration, improved memory performance, and ease of deployment.”