Years of collaboration between Intel and AWS have come to fruition with Intel Xeon 6 processors with P-cores now powering the new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) R8i and R8I-flex instances, delivering the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud.
“The launch of the 8th Generation EC2 instances powered by Intel Xeon 6 is a milestone in our collaboration with AWS,” says Ronak Singhal, senior fellow at Intel. “Together, we’ve built an infrastructure that accelerates AI, enhances memory performance, and simplifies deployment – helping customers achieve faster insights and stronger ROI.”
As enterprises increasingly rely on realtime data processing, AI, and compliance-intensive workloads the need for versatile, high-performance cloud infrastructure is critical. Intel Xeon 6 processors provide a flexible, general-purpose compute platform that minimises the reliance on specialised accelerators – streamlining deployment and management for diverse use cases.
“Our customers need infrastructure that matches the pace of their most demanding workloads,” says Nishant Mehta, vice-president of EC2 Product Management at AWS. “Through our collaboration with Intel, the new Amazon EC2 R8i and R8i-flex instances deliver breakthrough capabilities, offering 2.5x more memory bandwidth and 15% better price performance compared to previous generations. This is the kind of innovation that helps customers maximise performance while driving down costs.”
Intel worked to optimise across every layer of the stack – from processor microarchitecture and firmware tuning to hypervisor tuning, virtualisation and software frameworks. This tight integration ensures customers fully benefit from Xeon 6 capabilities across AWS’s global infrastructure.
This collaboration underscores Intel’s role as a foundational technology provider for AWS and the broader cloud ecosystem, enabling developers, data scientists, and IT leaders to innovate, scale, and deploy with greater speed and efficiency.
Key benefits of the new Xeon 6 based instances include:
- High-density compute: Xeon 6 features a rearchitected core design with increased core counts and improved pipelines, delivering greater performance and improved thread scalability. This advancement enables AWS to offer increased instance sizes like 96 x large, giving customers access to greater compute density for their workloads.
- Fastest DDR5 support in the cloud: With DDR5 memory speeds up to 7200 MT/s, the new instances deliver significantly higher memory bandwidth and lower latency – ideal for analytics, machine learning (ML), and in-memory databases.
- Built-in AI acceleration: Integrated Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX), enable up to 2x AI inference and ML performance gains, reducing the need for external accelerators and simplifying deployment.
- Intel QuickAssist Technology (QAT): Enables hardware-accelerated encryption and compression, freeing up CPU resources and boosting performance for security-sensitive and regulated workloads across industries including finance, healthcare, and public sector applications.