In August, we introduced the general-purpose Amazon EC2 M6i instances powered by the latest generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz. Compute-optimized EC2 C6i instances were also made available last month.

Today, I am happy to share that we are expanding our sixth-generation x86-based offerings to include memory-optimized Amazon EC2 R6i instances.

Here’s a quick recap of the advantages of the new R6i instances compared to R5 instances:

• A larger instance size (r6i.32xlarge) with 128 vCPUs and 1,024 GiB of memory that makes it easier and more cost-efficient to consolidate workloads and scale up applications
• Up to 15 percent improvement in compute price/performance
• Up to 20 percent higher memory bandwidth
• Up to 40 Gbps for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and 50 Gbps for networking which is 2x more than R5 instances
• Always-on memory encryption.

R6i instances are SAP Certified and are an ideal fit for memory-intensive workloads such as SQL and NoSQL databases, distributed web scale in-memory caches like Memcached and Redis, in-memory databases, and real-time big data analytics like Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark clusters.

Compared to M6i and C6i instances, the only difference is in the amount of memory that is included per vCPU. R6i instances are available in ten sizes:

Like M6i and C6i instances, these new R6i instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, which is a collection of building blocks that offloads many of the traditional virtualization functions to dedicated hardware, delivering high performance, high availability, and highly secure cloud instances.

As with all sixth generation EC2 instances, you may need to upgrade your Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) for optimal networking performance. For more information, see this article about migrating an EC2 instance to a sixth-generation instance in the AWS Knowledge Center.

R6i instances support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) on r6i.32xlarge and r6i.metal instances for workloads that benefit from lower network latency, such as HPC and video processing.

Availability and Pricing
EC2 R6i instances are available today in four AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), Europe (Ireland). As usual with EC2, you pay for what you use. For more information, see the EC2 pricing page.

— Danilo

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