At AWS re:Invent 2021, we launched Amazon EC2 M6a instances powered by the 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors, running at frequencies up to 3.6 GHz, which offer customers up to 35 percent improvement in price-performance compared to M5a instances.

Many customers are looking for ways to optimize their cloud utilization, and they are taking advantage of the compute choice that Amazon EC2 offers. Customers such as Dropbox, Capital One, and Sprinklr have been able to realize the cost benefits of AWS using EC2 instances powered by AMD EPYC processors.

Today, I am happy to announce the availability of the new compute-optimized Amazon EC2 C6a instances, which offer up to up to 15 percent improvement in price-performance versus C5a instances, and 10 percent lower cost than comparable x86-based EC2 instances.

These instances are ideal for running compute-intensive workloads such as high-performance web servers, batch processing, ad serving, machine learning, multi-player gaming, video encoding, high performance computing (HPC) such as scientific modeling, and machine learning.

Compared to C5a instances, this new instance type provides:

Up to 15 percent improvement in compute price performance.
Up to 40 Gbps for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS).
Up to 50 Gbps for network bandwidth.

To increase instance security, C6a instances have always-on memory encryption with AMD Transparent Single Key Memory Encryption (TSME), and support new AVX2 instructions for accelerating encryption and decryption algorithms.

Like M6a, C6a instances are also available in 10 sizes:

Name
vCPUs
Memory
(GiB)
Network Bandwidth
(Gbps)
EBS Throughput
(Gbps)

c6a.large
2
4
Up to 12.5
Up to 6.6

c6a.xlarge
4
8
Up to 12.5
Up to 6.6

c6a.2xlarge
8
16
Up to 12.5
Up to 6.6

c6a.4xlarge
16
32
Up to 12.5
Up to 6.6

c6a.8xlarge
32
64
12.5
6.6

c6a.12xlarge
48
96
18.75
10

c6a.16xlarge
64
128
25
13.3

c6a.24xlarge
96
192
37.5
20

c6a.32xlarge
128
256
50
26.6

c6a.48xlarge
192
384
50
40

The new instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a collection of building blocks that offloads many of the traditional virtualization functions to dedicated hardware for high performance, high availability, and highly secure cloud instances.

Available Now
C6a instances are available today in three AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland). As usual with EC2, you pay for what you use. For more information, see the EC2 pricing page.

To learn more, visit the EC2 C6a instance and AWS/AMD partner page. You can send feedback to  ec2-amd-customer-feedback@amazon.com, AWS re:Post for EC2, or through your usual AWS Support contacts.

— Channy

PS – With the launch of C6a instances there are now officially more than 500 Amazon EC2 instances for customers to choose from!