One of Intel's fastest CPUs yet is now available for AWS customers as Amazon's cloud computing unit has introduced its new Amazon EC2 M5zn instances which are powered by custom 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Cascade Lake).

The company's new M5zn instances build on the success of its z1d instances that were first released in mid-2018. These new instances use Intel Xeon Scalable processors with a sustained all-core turbo clock frequency of up to 4.5 GHz.

Thanks to the combination of high per-core compute performance and a balanced memory footprint, M5zn instances are an ideal fit for a wide variety of workloads including gaming, financial applications, simulation modeling applications and other High Performance Computing (HPC) applications.

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Amazon EC2 M5zn instances are built on the AWS Nitro System which is a collection of AWS-designed hardware and software innovations that enable the delivery of private networking as well as efficient, flexible and secure cloud services with isolated multi-tenancy.

Amazon EC2 M5z2

AWS' new M5zn instances are available in seven sizes ranging from 2 to 48 vCPUs with 8 to 182 GiB of memory. These new instances are also capable of providing up to 45 percent better single-threaded compute performance that EC2 M5 instances due to the fact that they are powered by custom 2nd Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors.

At the same time, these new instances also feature 100 Gbps networking with support for the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) and up to 19 Gbps of throughput to the Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). 

M5zn is even available as a bare metal instance called M5zn.metal that is ideal for workloads that require access to the hardware feature set such as Intel VT-x for applications that need to run in non-virtualized environments for licensing or support requirements or for customers that wish to use their own hypervisor.

M5zn will be available for purchase with Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, Convertible Reserved, On-Demand and Spot instances or as Dedicated instances or Dedicated hosts. The new instances are now available in a number of AWS regions including AWS US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo).

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