Our customers continue to increase the sophistication and intensity of the compute-bound workloads that they run on the Cloud. Applications such as top-end website hosting, online gaming, simulation, risk analysis, and rendering are voracious consumers of CPU cycles and can almost always benefit from the parallelism offered by today’s multicore processors.

The New C4 Instance Type

Today we are pre-announcing the latest generation of compute-optimized Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. The new C4 instances are based on the Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (code name Haswell) processor. This custom processor, designed specifically for EC2, runs at a base speed of 2.9 GHz, and can achieve clock speeds as high as 3.5 GHz with Turbo boost. These instances are designed to deliver the highest level of processor performance on EC2. If you’ve got the workload, we’ve got the instance!

Here’s the lineup (these specs are preliminary and could change a bit before launch time):

Instance Name vCPU Count RAM Network Performance c4.large 2 3.75 GiB Moderate c4.xlarge 4 7.5 GiB Moderate c4.2xlarge 8 15 GiB High c4.4xlarge 16 30 GiB High c4.8xlarge 36 60 GiB 10 Gbps

These instances are a great match for the SSD-Backed Elastic Block Storage that we introduced earlier this year. EBS Optimization is enabled by default for all C4 instance sizes, and is available to you at no extra charge. C4 instances also allow you to achieve significantly higher packet per second (PPS) performance, lower network jitter, and lower network latency using Enhanced Networking.

Like most of our newer instance types, the C4 instances will use Hardware Virtualization (HVM) in order to get the best performance from the underlying CPU, and will run within a Virtual Private Cloud.

The c4.8xlarge instances give you the ability to fine-tune the processor’s performance and power management (which can affect maximum Turbo frequencies) using P-state and C-state control. They also give you 36 vCPUs for improved compute performance.

Stay tuned for pricing and additional technical information!

— Jeff;