April 27, 2022 — Amazon Web Services has launched new new I4i instances powered by the latest generation Intel Xeon Scalable (Ice Lake) Processors with an all-core turbo frequency of 3.5 GHz.
The company said The instances offer up to 30 TB of NVMe storage using AWS Nitro SSD devices that are custom-built by AWS, and are designed to minimize latency and maximize transactions per second (TPS) on workloads that need very fast access to medium-sized datasets on local storage. This includes transactional databases such as MySQL, Oracle DB, and Microsoft SQL Server, as well as NoSQL databases: MongoDB, Couchbase, Aerospike, Redis, and the like. They are also an ideal fit for workloads that can benefit from very high compute performance per TB of storage such as data analytics and search engines.
AWS said the i4i.16xlarge and i4i.32xlarge instances provide control over C-states, and the i4i.32xlarge instances support non-uniform memory access (NUMA). All of the instances support AVX-512, and use Intel Total Memory Encryption (TME) to deliver always-on memory encryption.
Early adopters include Redis Enterprises, which powers mission-critical applications for over 8,000 organizations. According to Yiftach Shoolman (Co-Founder and CTO of Redis): “We are thrilled with the performance we are seeing from the Amazon EC2 I4i instances which use the new low latency AWS Nitro SSDs. Our testing shows I4i instances delivering an astonishing 2.9x higher query throughput than the previous generation I3 instances. We have also tested with various read and write mixes, and observed consistent and linearly scaling performance.”
ScyllaDB is a high performance NoSQL database that can take advantage of high performance cloud computing instances. Avi Kivity (Co-Founder and CTO of ScyllaDB), said: “When we tested I4i instances, we observed up to 2.7x increase in throughput per vCPU compared to I3 instances for reads. With an even mix of reads and writes, we observed 2.2x higher throughput per vCPU, with a 40 percent reduction in average latency than I3 instances. We are excited for the incredible performance and value these new instances will enable for our customers going forward.
I4i instances are available now in the AWS US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Ireland) regions (with more to come) in on-demand and spot form.
More information is at the I4i instance home page.
