Amazon releases its latest virtual cloud servers based on third-gen EPYC processors

AMD touts its EPYC processors as capable of handling the most demanding use-cases of server and cloud clients that include Tencent, VMWare, Google and HP Enterprise. Now, one of them has been made available to some, mostly to those in professional, research, AI and even large-scale gaming right on the cloud.

Amazon is pitching its latest AWS instances at users such as these, at least. Their latest Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) M6a iterations are, like their M5a predecessors, based on EPYC silicon - however, they are of the 3rd generation in this case, which run at up to 3.6 gigahertz (GHz). They are thus rated for various improvements and enhancements over previously-available instances.

The company asserts that the M6a instances offer an improvement in price-performance of up to 15%   compared to M5a servers. However, they are also touted to deliver speeds of up to 40 gigabits per second (Gb/s) when transferring to or from Amazon Elastic Block Store (this firm's large-scale scalable and high-performance cloud storage solution) or as much as 50Gb/s for networking.

In addition, being Milan-based, M6a instances support AMD's Transparent Single Key Memory Encryption (TSME) for always-on encryption, as well as the AVX2 instruction set to expedite the same (as well as its decryption). These virtual servers have been released  in 10 sizes, which range from those with 2 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) and 4GB of memory to the top-end versions with 192 vCPUs and 384GB - which are the ones that support the top speeds Amazon touts for the new option in cloud service.

Nevertheless, M6a instances apparently cost up to 10% less than their x86-based counterparts. They can be accessed from Amazon's US (N. Virginia and Oregon) and Irish sites from now on a pay-as-you-use basis.