Amazon starts offering EC2 instances with AMD Epyc Rome CPUs
Amazon Web Services has started offering EC2 C5a instances broadly with AMD’s second-generation Epyc CPUs, called Rome. These are intended for compute-intensive workloads. Amazon has long offered EC2 instances with AMD first-generation Epyc CPUs.
The new EC2 C5a instances are powered by AMD’s second-generation Epyc Rome CPUs, Amazon reports. In practice, instances are a kind of virtual servers. The new C5a instances are primarily intended for compute-intensive workloads. For example, the C5a instances can be used for distributed analytics, data transformations, web applications and batch processing. Also uses for deep learning or servers for multiplayer games are mentioned as possible use cases.
The company currently offers eight different configurations, with up to 96 vCpus, which equates to 48 physical cores with simultaneous multithreading. The most extensive variant also offers 192GB of memory and a network bandwidth of up to 20Gbit/s. The simplest configuration consists of 2 vCpus with 4GB of RAM and a maximum network bandwidth of 10Gbit/s. The current variants only have elastic block storage, with the bandwidth of this storage differing per configuration.
The different EC2 C5a configurations. Image via AWS
The maximum clock speed of the CPUs is 3.3GHz, although according to AMD this is the maximum clock speed of an individual core. According to Anandtech, who have tested an Epyc Rome instance of AWS, a clock speed of 3.3GHz is achievable on all 96 threads simultaneously, although this speed dropped to 3.2GHz after a few minutes. With more compute-intensive workloads, the clock speed during the tests was around 3.1GHz.
In the future, Amazon and AMD will come up with disk variants of the new Epyc instances. These come with local nvme storage. Bare metal variants with a maximum of 100 Gbit/s of network bandwidth will also become available in due course. Current EC2 C5a instances are currently available to everyone in several AWS regions in the US, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region.
The current EC2 offering with Epyc CPUs. Image via AWS