Amazon Web Services (AWS) has teamed up with Intel to announce the eighth generation of memory-optimized EC2 instances: the R8i and R8i-flex. These new instance types run on specially developed Intel Xeon 6 processors with DDR5 7200 MT/s memory. According to AWS, they deliver the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth of any comparable Intel processors in the cloud. For Intel, which has been under considerable pressure in recent weeks, this is a welcome boost: the world's largest cloud provider has explicitly chosen customized Xeons.
The R8i comes in variants from two to 384 vCPUs. Intel offers many Xeon 6 variants with 96 cores, which we mention as AWS counts a vCPU as one thread on an x86 processor. A single 96-core CPU therefore offers 192 EC2 vCPUs, and a two socket-server provides 384 - matching the mightiest of the R8* instance types. The instances also allow users to vary bandwidth configuration so it's allocated differently between network access and connections to Amazon's elastic block store. Doing so can apparently improve database performance.