Intel announced on the 3rd that Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances powered by custom 4th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors.

Intel explains that instances based on the 4th Generation Intel Xeon processor continue to grow in number and offer users an attractive total cost of ownership (TCO). They offer multiple built-in accelerators to handle key workloads such as AI, databases, networking, and enterprise applications.

New Amazon EC2 instances, including the Amazon EC2 M7i-flex and M7i, provide customers with the built-in accelerator performance of 4th-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, leveraging AWS's extensive global infrastructure. Built-in accelerators, such as Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel AMX), provide a necessary alternative for customers with growing AI workload demands. 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors with Intel AMX meet inference performance benchmarks for large-scale language models with fewer than 20 billion parameters. This enables cost-effective and sustainable operation of large-scale language models on general-purpose infrastructure.

Together, the two companies offer customers the product choices that best fit their workload, performance, and price requirements, while also providing the convenience and flexibility needed to meet future digital infrastructure demands.

The M7i-flex instances offer superior price-performance for most general-purpose workloads, and can be designed to seamlessly run general-purpose workloads such as web and application servers, virtual desktops, batch processing, microservices, databases, and enterprise applications. Furthermore, they emphasized that they offer up to 19% better price-performance compared to M6i instances.

M7i instances offer price-performance advantages for critical workloads such as large-scale application servers, databases, game servers, CPU-based machine learning, and video streaming. Instance sizes have also increased, with up to 192 vCPUs and 768 GiB of memory, and new built-in accelerators support efficient offload and acceleration of data operations, optimizing performance for database, encryption and compression, and queue management workloads. In terms of cost, it added that it offers up to 15% higher price-performance ratio than M6i instances.

Currently, M7i-flex and M7i instances are available in AWS regions: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland).

“Intel has been working closely with AWS to bring feature-rich 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors to AWS cloud customers,” said Lisa Spelman, vice president and general manager of the Xeon Products and Solutions Group at Intel. “Many customers have been able to enjoy the performance and value for months through private and public previews, and with today’s announcement, we are pleased to bring the same real-world value to cloud customers worldwide.”