Memory bandwidth boost appears to be the secret sauce in chips used for new memory optimized instance types

Amazon Web Services has revealed it’s started running some custom cuts of Intel’s Xeon 6 processors.

The cloud colossus on Tuesday announced two new instance types – the R8i and R8i-flex – that it says “deliver the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud.”

AWS’s instance type listing states that R8i and R8i-flex both feature “DDR5 7200MT/s memory” and operate at “up to 3.9 GHz all-core turbo frequency” but offer no other details about any tweaks to the Xeon 6.

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 ...