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The New M4 Instance Type

by stevencorona on 6/11/15, 11:18 PM with 22 comments

• by listic on 6/12/15, 12:31 AM

  Just how custom is the E5-2676 v3 processor?

  I see this paticular model is not in the Intel's list of models [1] nor in the Wikipedia [2].

  I suspect that, as the model number suggests, it is virtually identical to E5-2670 v3 [3] and 100 MHz higher base clock rate and 100 MHz lower Turbo Boost frequency is all customization there is (but what about the exact turbo profile?), but the fact that Intel does it at all, even for a customer as large as Amazon (how much are they ordering, actually?), is an interesting development.

  [1] Intel® Xeon® Processor E5 v3 Family http://ark.intel.com/products/family/78583/Intel-Xeon-Proces...

  [2] Wikipedia: List of Intel Xeon microprocessors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Xeon_microprocess...

  [3] Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2670 v3 (30M Cache, 2.30 GHz) http://ark.intel.com/products/81709/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-...

• by Ciantic on 6/12/15, 7:05 AM

  I don't have a great need for VPS, but I still like running a few.

  I have never tried Amazon VPS because their pricing calculation is really confusing, especially when I just want smallest VPS to play with. This announcement is just as unclear on actual price than any other pricing page in Amazon's site.

  I like the way Digital Ocean makes it simple to understand how much it costs to try their smallest VPS. Why can't the Amazon do something like that? Simple chart for monthly payment.

• by helper on 6/12/15, 12:21 AM

  I wonder why the m4 instances are less expensive than the m3s: m4.xlarge is $0.252 vs m3.xlarge $0.266. The c4 instances are more expense than the c3 instances.

• by amluto on 6/12/15, 4:21 AM

  I'm curious how the C state control works. What does /proc/cpuinfo look like? Are they letting mwait through for real? Are these Xen or real virtualization? I wish Amazon would document their virtual hardware platform more clearly.

• by Sanddancer on 6/12/15, 12:25 AM

  Is that core count right for the big instance? The same cpu is used on the data-heavy nodes [1] and it says it maxes out at 36 cores. Or does amazon save some cores for their own uses on those boxes?

  [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/next-generation-of-dense-st...

• by mindprince on 6/12/15, 2:16 AM

  A bit surprising that these instances are EBS only and don't have any ephemeral disks at all.

• by nierman on 6/12/15, 12:04 AM

  MB/s is probably incorrect for the EBS throughput instance limits; those values make more sense if they use Mb/s.