Amazon Launches Compute-Intensive C4 EC2 Instances

Amazon Web Services is expanding the number of different instance types available on Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) with the announcement of the explosively-named C4 instance. Designed to be a compute-optimized instance on the EC2 infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), the new C4 instance is aimed at customers with applications that require high levels of performance.

As Jeff Barr, chief evangelist for Amazon Web Services, noted in a blog post, this is only an announcement about the new C4 instance. It isn’t yet readily available, but Barr stated that Amazon will release pricing and additional technical information in time.

According to Barr, the C4 instance will be ideal for applications like top-end web hosting, online gaming, simulation, risk analysis and rendering. Such applications are “voracious consumers” of CPU cycles, and Amazon promises C4 will provide the highest level of processor performance available so far on EC2.

Built on the Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (Haswell) processor designed specifically for EC2 instances, the process runs at a base speed of 2.9 GHz and can achieve clock speeds of 3.5 GHz with turbo boost, Barr wrote. Basically, the C4 is a workhorse instance for applications that require high performance.

“These instances are a great match for the SSD-Backed Elastic Block Storage that we introduced earlier this year,” Barr wrote. “EBS Optimization is enabled by default for all C4 instance sizes, and is available to you at no extra charge. C4 instances also allow you to achieve significantly higher packet per second (PPS) performance, lower network jitter, and lower network latency using Enhanced Networking.”

Amazon has not yet released details as to when the C4 instance will be generally available.