Posted On: Feb 14, 2022
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announces the general availability of compute optimized Amazon EC2 C6a instances. C6a instances are powered by 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors (code named Milan) with an all-core turbo frequency of up to 3.6 GHz, deliver up to 15% better compute price performance compared to C5a instances for a wide variety of workloads, and offer 10% lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances. C6a instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a combination of dedicated hardware and lightweight hypervisor, which delivers practically all of the compute and memory resources of the host hardware to your instances.
To meet customer demands for increased scalability, C6a instances provide two new instance sizes, the largest with 192 vCPUs and 384 GiB of memory, twice the size of the largest C5a instances. C6a instances also give customers up to 50 Gbps of networking speed and 40 Gbps of bandwidth to the Amazon Elastic Block Store, which is more than twice that of C5a instances. Customers can use Elastic Fabric Adapter on the 48xlarge size, which enables low latency and highly-scalable inter-node communication. For optimal networking performance on these new instances, an Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) driver update may be required. For more information on optimal ENA driver for C6a, see this article.
These instances are generally available today in AWS US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) Regions. C6a instances are available in 10 sizes with 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 48, 64, 96, 128, and 192 vCPUs. Customers can purchase the new instances via Savings Plans, Reserved, On-Demand, and Spot instances. To get started, visit the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. To learn more, visit the C6a instances page.