Amazon EC2 instances powered by Intel’s new Sapphire Rapids CPUs
Amazon EC2 instances powered by Intel’s new Sapphire Rapids CPUs have gone live, as the cloud giant says they offer up to 15% better performance than competing cloud providers. The new chips also provide a 19% better price performance, according to AWS. The new M7i instances replace the M6i instances, and they’re designed to handle a range of general-purpose workloads that require large instance sizes or continuous high CPU usage.
The new M7i instances
The new M7i instances are available in a wide range of sizes, ranging from two vCPUs and 8GB of DDR5 memory all the way up to 192 vCPUs, 768GB of memory, and 50 Gbps network bandwidth. They support Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) for accelerated matrix multiplication and feature built-in Intel accelerators, which should help with machine-learning training and inference workloads.
Intel says that CPUs with AMX can meet the performance requirements for large language models with less than 20 billion parameters. It also says that AWS customers will benefit from future additions to the M7i family, which will include bare-metal sizes for high-transaction and latency-sensitive workloads.
M7i-Flex instances
In addition to the M7i instances, AWS is also offering M7i-Flex instances, which are a lower-cost variant of the M7i instances. M7i-Flex instances provide a baseline of 40% CPU performance and can scale up to full CPU performance 95% of the time. They’re designed to handle applications that don’t fully utilize compute resources at all times.
When it comes to comparison with other cloud providers, Amazon says that M7i-Flex instances offer 15% higher CPU performance. “Customers with applications that don’t fully utilise compute resources at all times can now run them on the most efficient cloud CPU available,” the company says.
Lisa Spelman, Intel corporate vice president, and general manager of the Xeon Products and Solutions Group, highlights the collaboration between Intel and AWS in bringing these processors to the cloud market.
“The value and performance of these processors has been tested and proven in both private and public previews,” she says. “We’re excited to collaborate with AWS to bring these processors to the cloud market, and we look forward to bringing even more performance to the AWS platform with future generations of Intel Xeon Scalable processors.”
If you’re looking to get your hands on some new M7i instances, you can check out our picks for the best M7i instances on Amazon EC2. You might also want to consider the best compatible M7i motherboard, as you’ll need a platform that supports the processors.
