Amazon Web Services announced the availability of C5 instances, its next generation of compute-optimized instances for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). The C5 instances feature 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Skylake-SP) up to 72 vCPUs, and 144 GiB of memory—twice the vCPUs and memory of previous generation C4 instances. The new C5s are aimed at compute-heavy applications like batch processing, distributed analytics, high-performance computing (HPC), ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding.
The C5 instances also introduce a number of unique features:
- networking is provided through an Elastic Network Adapter (ENA), a scalable network interface built by AWS to provide direct access to its networking hardware.
- additional dedicated hardware and network bandwidth for Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) enables C5 instances to offer high-performance storage through the scalable NVM Express (NVMe) interface.
- a new, lightweight hypervisor allows applications to use practically all of the compute and memory resources of a server, delivering reduced cost and even better performance.
AWS is offering C5 instances in six sizes—with the four smallest instance sizes offering substantially more Amazon EBS and network bandwidth than the previous generation of compute-optimized instances.