Amazon Web Services (AWS) Inc. launched this week its newest EC2 instance type, C4, based upon the Intel Haswell processor.
Werner Vogels, AWS Chief Technology Officer, announced the C4 instances at last November’s AWS re-Invent conference. He praised them as the fastest EC2 instances yet. AWS evangelist Jeff Barr stated Monday that the C4 instances are “designed to deliver the highest level processor performance on EC2”.
C4 instances can be used for compute-intensive workloads such as online gaming and risk-analysis. They have a base speed at 2.9 GHz but can reach speeds up to 3.5 GHz when they are equipped with support for Intel Turbo Boost technology.
The smallest C4 instance supports 2 virtual CPUs, with 500 Mbps dedicated EBS throughput. The largest supports 36 virtual CPUs, and has a dedicated throughput at 4,000 Mbps. Below is a breakdown of the C4 lineup.
Source: AWS Official Blog Currently, the C4 instances can be found in seven of the 11 AWS regions, including Oregon, Northern California and Northern Virginia, Ireland. Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo. Barr stated that they will soon be available in other regions.
AWS’s rollout of C4 instances closely follows Microsoft’s launch of the G-Series for Azure Virtual Machines. It claims that it “provide[s]] the most memory and the highest processing power, as well as the largest amount of local SSD of any Virtual Machine currently available in public cloud.” The G-Series is also based on the Intel Haswell chips and supports 32 virtual CPUs with 6.59TB solid-state drive space, 448GB memory, and up to 32 virtual machines.

Oswald