AWS Announces C5 Instances For EC2

AWS has announced a new generation of compute optimized instances, dubbed C5, which are now available for users of the Amazon EC2 cloud service.

These C5 instances are powered by the latest Intel Xeon Scalable processors, also known as Skylake-SP, and custom hardware. Impressively, the company says that they deliver a 25% improvement in price to performance.

In addition, AWS also revealed that it has created a new hypervisor based on KVM, a move away from the Xen hypervisor it has relied on for years.

This was mentioned, in what can be called a footnote, in the announcement where the cloud giant officially confirmed the availability of these new C5 instances powered by the Intel Skylake chips. The company also updated the FAQs about these new instances, making a mention of KVM.

The new hypervisor probably explains why the company took such a long time adding Skylake into the mix, becoming the last of the big cloud providers to run this new Intel platform.

Intel, meanwhile, has offered new details on these, if you’re interested.

But long story short, Intel and AWS both say that this is a custom 3.0 GHz Xeon Platinum 8000 series processor. The two companies collaborated on optimizing these chips for AI and deep learning engines, with the latest version of the Intel Math Kernel Library.

What this means is that MXNet and other deep learning frameworks are highly optimized to run on these C5 instances.

Amazon also shared a ton more details in the press release, revealing that this new instance type is designed for compute heavy applications like batch processing, distributed analytics, high performance computing, ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding.

Click this link to find out more details about these C5 instances.