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AWS Launches 896-Core Instance, Double What Competitors Offer

Nomad76

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Liftr Insights, a pioneer in market intelligence driven by unique data, revealed today that it detected AWS's recent launch of an 896-core instance type, surpassing the previous highest core counts by any cloud provider. This is important to companies looking to improve performance. If they are not using these, their competitors might be.

Liftr data show the previous AWS high core-count instance had 448 cores and first appeared in May 2021. Prior to that, the largest instance available in the six largest cloud providers (representing over 75% of the public cloud space) was a 384-core instance first offered by Azure in 2019.





The prices for this new instance type range by configuration and city from ~$150 per hour to over $400 per hour with an average price of $263.10.

Companies are willing to pay these prices to achieve high thread counts that improve performance, especially for databases like SAP HANA and Oracle. Liftr Insights tracks many characteristics, including the high memory configuration associated with these instances and the on-demand price.

"It's not advantageous for AWS to deploy solutions that won't sell, especially at these price-points," says Tab Schadt, CEO of Liftr Insights. "They spend significant time and money on their market intelligence. Other companies can benefit from their research about what they are offering and where they offer them at a fraction of that cost."

Consistent with other AWS deployments, this instance first appeared in the East and West coast regions of the US, but they also deployed these instance types in Seoul and Sydney. The 448-core instances were deployed early on across the globe, but initial appearances were in Dublin, Frankfurt and Singapore. Deployments of the 448-core instance did not appear in Seoul and Sydney until 3 and 6 months later, respectively. Deploying to those non-US regions from the start for this 896-core instance is a strong sign of demand in those areas.

"Perhaps we'll see larger instances in the near future, showing even more demand for high performance workloads," says Schadt. "At the least, we'll keep an eye out to see if and when Azure or other cloud providers respond in kind."

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Addendum: These are Sapphire Rapids vCPUs rather than actual cores. AWS, like other cloud providers, is counting a Sapphire Rapids core twice due to SMT.
 
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Addendum: These are Sapphire Rapids vCPUs rather than actual cores. AWS, like other cloud providers, is counting a Sapphire Rapids core twice due to SMT.
So that is a 8S 56 cores Sapphires Rapids platform?

I wonder if Intel is selling a ton of those or if there isn't much demand for those multi-socket server CPUs.

AMD doesn't seem to care for the market above 2 Sockets. If you could deploy Zen 4c in a 8S configuration, that would have been something like 2048 vCPUs?
 
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So that is a 8S 56 cores Sapphires Rapids platform?

I wonder if Intel is selling a ton of those or if there isn't much demand for those multi-socket server CPUs.

AMD doesn't seem to care for the market above 2 Sockets. If you could deploy Zen 4c in a 8S configuration, that would have been something like 2048 vCPUs?
That's correct; these are 8S Sapphire Rapids based servers. With increasing core counts and the increasing number of DIMMs per socket, the demand for machines with more than two sockets has decreased significantly.
 
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I opened the article to scan for "AI" references to why someone would want that much power and I was pleasantly surprised to find no references and instead more relevant reasons for 896 cores.
So kudos to them for the restraint
 
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Tempted to rent one of those for a couple hours to see how a Chromium compile scales on them...

Sad that AMD doesn't make at least 4 socket systems anymore. Their offerings used to be pretty cool.
 
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