7 ms·
Amazon EC2 Instance Update – Faster Processors and More Memory
- benologist 8y agoThe tech community shouldn't be so quick to fund Bezos' appalling work practices and tax theft. http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-workers-have-to-pee-into-bottles-2018-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-warehouse-workers-have...
- nnx 8y ago> Z1d instances use custom Intel® Xeon® Scalable Processors running at up to 4.0 GHz, powered by sustained all-core Turbo Boost. Sounds rather impressive. Are similar Xeons available anywhere else?
- NathanKP 8y agoAzure has the 2.7 GHz Intel Xeon® Platinum 8168 SkyLake processor. It has clock speeds as high as 3.7 GHz with the Intel Turbo Boost, but that's for a single core not all core, and also not sustained. And on GCP the best CPU is 2.6 GHz Intel Xeon E5 (Sandy Bridge) So when these Z1d instances are GA they will be the fastest available VM's across the major clouds.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- namibj 8y agoThere is the E3-1270v6 with 3.8GHz base Kaby Lake over at Vultr. Packet also seems to have nice offerings, but both are in these configurations supplied as bare-metal. It always depends on what you need.
- tbrock 8y agoSo in other words, no, there is nothing comparable on the market if you want all core performance like this.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wmf 8y agoZ1d sounds very similar to a 2x Gold 6146 system which has 3.9 GHz all-core turbo.
- NDizzle 8y agoThe z1d.6xlarge is a great match for what I was just searching for... I'm looking for a spot to park my 16 core 192gb SQL Servers, which have licensing for exactly 16 cores. I was looking at the 32 core, 244gb r4.8xlarge instances and trying to figure out what to do with the unused cores!
- dman 8y agoLease them out to me for my build farm :)
- p1necone 8y agoWould running two VM's on the 32 core server be too much overhead?
- kondro 8y agoYou can actually take most EC2 instances and specify the number of cores it has for this type of licensing issue: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance-optimize-cpu.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/instance...
- degenerate 8y agoAnecdotal comment: it looks like Amazon is putting an audio player at the top of each press release to showcase their "Amazon Polly" deep learning voiceover. Starting at 3:18 in the audio it starts reading the entire table and (expectedly) screws up reading the table, but not too bad. However it's a great way of proving that we are not ready for computers to read to us yet.
- some_account 8y agoI think it sounds pretty good for normal text though.
- jeffbarr 8y agoThe audio is generated by Amazon Polly; see https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/give-your-wordpress-blog-a-voice-with-our-new-amazon-polly-plugin/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/give-your-wordpress-blog-a-... for more info! I now use the audio version as a second form of proofreading, and find that it helps me to find places where my written transitions could be better. I agree that there's room to make the contents of the table sound better, but I am not sure what direction this should go in. Suggestions are welcome!
- degenerate 8y agoHi Jeff, here's a suggestion: When entering a table, maybe Polly can announce the table and read each data cell followed by the <th> descriptor for that cell. Example: "Table 1: Row 1: [Instance name: z1d.large] ... [vCPUs: 2] ... [Memory: 16 GB] ... [Local Storage: 1 x 75 GB NVMe SSD] ... [EBS-Optimized Bandwidth: Up to 2.333 Gbps] ... [Network Bandwidth: Up to 10 Gbps] ... [pause] ... Row 2: [...]" This is how a human would read it, so Polly should do it that way too. What a human actually ends up doing though, is reference the preceding row for each subsequent row. Something like "z1d.xlarge has double the vCPUs, double the Memory, and double the Local Storage, with EBS-Optimized Bandwidth and Network Bandwidth the same." -- I don't think you are at that point yet with Polly ;)
- jeffbarr 8y ago
- the8472 8y agoNice, the z1d instances might be perfect for interactive raytracing we do at $employer. The tracing itself is quite efficient and parallel, but scene manipulation has a lot of single core and IO bottlenecks. Plus the metal versions are useful to profile the whole thing.
- Roritharr 8y agoI take it these vCPUs are hyperthreads? Or are they actual cores with HT turned off?
- wmf 8y agoYeah, vCPUs are hyperthreads.
- nodesocket 8y agoGoogle Cloud instance types are so much easier to grok and simple. I think AWS adds complexity and makes poor user experience decisions on purpose sometimes (tongue and cheek). AWS T2, M5, M5d, C5, C5d, X1e, X1, R4, H1, I3, D2 vs GCE standard, memory optimized, or compute optimized. Want a custom amount of cores and memory on GCE? No problem, just punch it in. Then there is EC2 billing... Google Cloud sustained use and committed use discounts are superior yet again.
- cbsmith 8y agoAmazon groups the types into standard, memory optimized, compute optimized, and storage optimized.
- JimmyAustin 8y ago"Sustained all-code Turbo Boost" sounds like a euphemism for "We want to say overclocked but Intel won't let us".
- notatoad 8y agoIsn't turbo boost an Intel trademark? If so, that sounds more like a "factory overclock", which isn't really an overclock at all.
- wmf 8y agoTo elaborate on this, the processor is guaranteed to function correctly at turbo speeds (while overclocking has no such guarantee) but Intel doesn't guarantee that turbo frequency will be reached all the time. The more intense your code, the lower frequency you get. Fortunately most server code is integer-only and has low IPC so it should hit 4.0 GHz.
- dmichulke 8y agoIf my memory serves me well, Knight Rider had a Turbo Boost before Intel :-)
- stephengillie 8y agoIn the show, look for the one bush that isn't burning in the lava, or otherwise shouldn't be there. They hid a ramp behind it every time.
- stephengillie 8y ago> What is Intel® Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 and how does it work? Intel® Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 uses a driver coupled with information stored in the CPU. It identifies and directs workloads to the fastest core on the die first. The driver also allows for custom configuration via a whitelist that enables end users to set priority to preferred applications. The driver MUST be present on the system and configured correctly, as current operating systems can't effectively route workloads to ordered cores. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000021587/processors.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
- andrewstuart 8y agoI'd like to see nested virtualization on EC2.
- AWS_F1 8y agoThe press release mentions Z1d.metal bare metal version coming soon, that would save the need to run hypervisor on hypervisor in the largest instance.
- voltagex_ 8y agoStill no way to get 16+ cores without huge amounts of RAM (and cost). My workloads are CPU bound but not particularly memory intensive.
- AWS_F1 8y agoDid you consider C5/C5d ? they typically get to 3.5Ghz and have smaller DRAM/vCPU ratio
- voltagex_ 8y agoC4 spot instances work for me at the moment. The price increase for C5 wasn't worth it as I was only seeing a 5-10% performance increase. I need to re-benchmark though.
- Johnny555 8y agoThe price increase for C5 wasn't worth I don't know about spot pricing, but on demand pricing for c5's is about 15% less than the c4's. If you look at c5d's with ephemeral storage they are still a bit cheaper than c4's.
- paulddraper 8y agoc5.4xlarge * 16 vCPU at 3.0 GHz/3.5 GHz Turbo * 32 GB RAM * $0.68/hr on demand, $0.43/hr reserved, ~$0.24/hr spot You could argue that's too expensive, but the cost is coming from the compute, not the 32 GB of memory.
- AWS_F1 8y agoZ1d, R5 and R5d are publicly available now https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-r5-r5d-and-z1d-instances/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/now-available-r5-r5d-and-z1...