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New – Amazon EC2 M6i Instances Powered by the Latest-Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors
Last year, we introduced the sixth generation of EC2 instances powered by AWS-designed Graviton2 processors. We’re now expanding our sixth-generation offerings to include x86-based instances, delivering price/performance benefits for workloads that rely on x86 instructions.
Today, I am happy to announce the availability of the new general purpose Amazon EC2 M6i instances, which offer up to 15% improvement in price/performance versus comparable fifth-generation instances. The new instances are powered by the latest generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors (code-named Ice Lake) with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz.
You might have noticed that we’re now using the “i” suffix in the instance type to specify that the instances are using an Intel processor. We already use the suffix “a” for AMD processors (for example, M5a instances) and “g” for Graviton processors (for example, M6g instances).
Compared to M5 instances using an Intel processor, this new instance type provides:
- A larger instance size (m6i.32xlarge) with 128 vCPUs and 512 GiB of memory that makes it easier and more cost-efficient to consolidate workloads and scale up applications.
- Up to 15% improvement in compute price/performance.
- Up to 20% higher memory bandwidth.
- Up to 40 Gbps for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) and 50 Gbps for networking.
- Always-on memory encryption.
M6i instances are a good fit for running general-purpose workloads such as web and application servers, containerized applications, microservices, and small data stores. The higher memory bandwidth is especially useful for enterprise applications, such as SAP HANA, and high performance computing (HPC) workloads, such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD).
M6i instances are also SAP-certified. For over eight years SAP customers have been relying on the Amazon EC2 M-family of instances for their mission critical SAP workloads. With M6i instances, customers can achieve up to 15% better price/performance for SAP applications than M5 instances.
M6i instances are available in nine sizes (the m6i.metal size is coming soon):
| Name | vCPUs | Memory (GiB) |
Network Bandwidth (Gbps) |
EBS Throughput (Gbps) |
| m6i.large | 2 | 8 | Up to 12.5 | Up to 10 |
| m6i.xlarge | 4 | 16 | Up to 12.5 | Up to 10 |
| m6i.2xlarge | 8 | 32 | Up to 12.5 | Up to 10 |
| m6i.4xlarge | 16 | 64 | Up to 12.5 | Up to 10 |
| m6i.8xlarge | 32 | 128 | 12.5 | 10 |
| m6i.12xlarge | 48 | 192 | 18.75 | 15 |
| m6i.16xlarge | 64 | 256 | 25 | 20 |
| m6i.24xlarge | 96 | 384 | 37.5 | 30 |
| m6i.32xlarge | 128 | 512 | 50 | 40 |
The new 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.
For optimal networking performance on these new instances, upgrade your Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) drivers to version 3. For more information, see this article about how to get maximum network performance on sixth-generation EC2 instances.
M6i instances support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) on the m6i.32xlarge size for workloads that benefit from lower network latency, such as HPC and video processing.
Availability and Pricing
EC2 M6i instances are available today in six AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Singapore). As usual with EC2, you pay for what you use. For more information, see the EC2 pricing page.
— Danilo
