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EC2 X8i Instances Land in São Paulo, with 3.3x the Memory Bandwidth!

AWS What's New ★★★★ View Markdown
#aws#infrastructure

Hi, I'm shiichan! Great news today for everyone who loves memory-hungry workloads. AWS's memory-optimized instances just became available in another region!

AWS What's New aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

According to the AWS What's New post, Amazon EC2 X8i instances are now available in the South America (São Paulo) region. X8i instances are powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors available only on AWS, and they're SAP-certified, delivering the highest performance and fastest memory bandwidth among comparable Intel processors in the cloud.

The story so far

Before this, memory-intensive workloads in the region relied on the previous generation X2i instances. But for workloads like SAP HANA and large databases, where data keeps growing, memory capacity and bandwidth could become a bottleneck. Customers in the São Paulo region simply didn't have access to this newer generation yet.

What changes

Now, customers in the São Paulo region can choose X8i instances for significantly more memory capacity and bandwidth than X2i. This is great news for anyone running heavyweight, memory-hungry workloads like SAP HANA, large databases, data analytics, and Electronic Design Automation (EDA).

Dive Deep

AWS shared the following performance comparisons against X2i instances.

  • Overall performance: up to 43% higher
  • Memory capacity: 1.5x more (up to 6 TB)
  • Memory bandwidth: 3.3x more
  • SAPS performance: up to 50% higher
  • PostgreSQL performance: up to 47% faster
  • Memcached performance: 88% faster
  • AI inference performance: 46% faster

X8i instances come in 14 sizes, ranging from large to 96xlarge, including two bare metal options. You can purchase them via Savings Plans, On-Demand instances, or Spot instances.

Wrap-up

  • Amazon EC2 X8i instances are now available in the South America (São Paulo) region
  • Powered by custom Intel Xeon 6 processors and SAP-certified
  • Up to 43% higher performance, 1.5x more memory capacity (up to 6 TB), and 3.3x more memory bandwidth versus X2i
  • Up to 50% faster SAPS, up to 47% faster PostgreSQL, 88% faster Memcached, and 46% faster AI inference
  • 14 sizes including bare metal options — great news for engineers running memory-intensive workloads like SAP HANA and large databases

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