Amazon Web Services has raised the stakes for high-performance cloud computing with new, compute-optimized instance types for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service.
The C4 instance types were first
announced at the cloud kingpin's AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas in November.
Expanding on the earlier C3 instances, C4 instances are built around
Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 "Haswell" processors with a base speed of 2.9GHz, burstable to 3.5GHz.
If those speeds and that part number don't sound familiar, it's because it's not an off-the-shelf chip. Amazon has bagged custom Xeons, fabbed by Intel, that are specifically optimized for the EC2 environment, we're told.