New – Amazon EC2 C7a Instances Powered By 4th Gen AMD EPYC Processors for Compute Optimized Workloads

We launched the compute optimized Amazon EC2 C6a instances in February 2022 powered by 3rd Gen AMD EPYC (Milan) processors, running at frequencies up to 3.6 GHz.

Today, we’re announcing the general availability of new, compute optimized Amazon EC2 C7a instances, powered by the 4th Gen AMD EPYC (Genoa) processors with a maximum frequency of 3.7 GHz, which offer up to 50 percent higher performance compared to C6a instances. You can use this increased performance to process data faster, consolidate workloads, and lower the cost of ownership.

C7a instances offer up to 50 percent higher performance compared to C6a instances. These instances are ideal for running compute-intensive workloads such as high-performance web servers, batch processing, ad serving, machine learning, multiplayer gaming, video encoding, high performance computing (HPC) such as scientific modeling, and machine learning.

C7a instances support AVX-512, Vector Neural Network Instructions (VNNI), and brain floating point (bfloat16). These instances feature Double Data Rate 5 (DDR5) memory, which enables high-speed access to data in-memory, and deliver 2.25 times more memory bandwidth compared to the previous generation instances for lower latency.

C7a instances feature sizes of up to 192 vCPUs with 384 GiB RAM, which you have a new medium instance size, which enables you to right-size your workloads more accurately, offering 1 vCPU, 2 GiB. Here are the detailed specs:

C7a instances have up to 50 Gbps enhanced networking and 40 Gbps EBS bandwidth, and you can attach up to 128 EBS volumes to an instance, compared to up to 28 EBS volume attachments with the previous generation instances.

C7a instances support always-on memory encryption with AMD secure memory encryption (SME) and new AVX-512 instructions for accelerating encryption and decryption algorithms, convolutional neural network (CNN) based algorithms, financial analytics, and video encoding workloads. C7a instances also support AES-256 compared to AES-128 in C6a instances for enhanced security.

These instances are built on the AWS Nitro System and support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) for workloads that benefit from lower network latency and highly scalable inter-node communication, such as high-performance computing and video processing.

Now Available
Amazon EC2 C7a instances are now available in the following AWS Regions: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and EU (Ireland). As usual with Amazon EC2, you only pay for what you use. For more information, see the Amazon EC2 pricing page.

To learn more, visit the EC2 C7a instances page 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