Amazon Web Services has started offering a cloudy server packing a custom fourth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processor and boasting 96 cores or 192 vCPUs.

It's not clear if that's a colossal chip which would pack 36 more cores than the mightiest Xeon Intel [1]lists for sale to the public – the 60-core [2]Platinum 8490H – or a two-socket server with a lesser processor. Intel has form doing custom jobs that beat the kit of its official product list: we once spotted Oracle with a Xeon that [3]outpaced processors sold to other customers.

Whatever the kit inside the box news of it emerged in a Wednesday [4]post detailing the newly-available M7i-Flex and M7i instance types available in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

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That post lists an instance type called the "m7i.48xlarge" that offers 192 vCPUs, and AWS's [6]CPU options page lists the instance as offering 96 default CPU cores.

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We've asked AWS and Intel to detail the spec of the custom silicon, because a single CPU would be well beyond what Chipzilla has spoken about in public.

[9]Microsoft concession: You can run our wares in AWS virtual desktop under 'revised policy'

[10]AWS: IPv4 addresses cost too much, so you’re going to pay

[11]Intel opens chip innovation hub in Nanshan, China

[12]Intel adds fresh x86 and vector instructions for future chips

Whatever's inside the servers running M7i-Flex and M7i instance types, AWS claims they "offer the best performance among comparable Intel processors in the cloud – up to 15 percent faster than Intel processors utilized by other cloud providers."

The M7I instance is suggested as suitable for large application servers and databases, gaming servers, CPU-based machine learning, and video streaming. The M7I-Flex are touted as suited to web and application servers, virtual desktops, batch processing, micro-services, databases, and enterprise applications. The Flex instances are said to offer five percent better price/performance and five percent lower prices than the vanilla M7I. AWS also says applications running on previous generations of its general purpose instances can move to M7I "without having to make changes to your application or your workload."

Bare metal M7I instances are in the works, with either 96 or 192 vCPUs.

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If Intel has indeed cooked AWS a 96-core Xeon, it's significant for several reasons.

One is that it would make the fourth-gen Xeon more than competitive with AMD's rival Genoa datacenter offering, which has henceforth beaten Intel's products for core count and therefore for compute density.

Another is that the fourth-gen Xeon Platinum 8490H sells for $17,000 apiece. As AWS buys in big numbers, Chipzilla may well have a nice little earner on its hands here, regardless of the core count.

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Last but not least, with or without a monster chip, the custom silicon shows that even as AWS promotes its own Arm-powered Graviton CPUs it clearly still sees a role for faster x86 CPUs.

As Intel deals with [15]a balance sheet balancing act , news that one of the planet's top CPU buyers has collaborated on very powerful custom kit is surely a fillip. ®

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[1] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/series/228622/4th-generation-intel-xeon-scalable-processors.html

[2] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/231747/intel-xeon-platinum-8490h-processor-112-5m-cache-1-90-ghz.html

[3] https://www.theregister.com/2015/06/04/oracle_intel_team_on_server_with_a_dimmer_switch/

[4] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-seventh-generation-general-purpose-amazon-ec2-instances-m7i-flex-and-m7i/

[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZMt6xVIkuHbgIaGndRPFEQAAAMo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0

[6] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/cpu-options-supported-instances-values.html

[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZMt6xVIkuHbgIaGndRPFEQAAAMo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[8] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZMt6xVIkuHbgIaGndRPFEQAAAMo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/02/microsoft_concession_you_can_run/

[10] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/31/aws_says_ipv4_addresses_cost/

[11] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/02/intel_opens_chip_innovation_hub/

[12] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/26/intel_x86_vector_instructions/

[13] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZMt6xVIkuHbgIaGndRPFEQAAAMo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[14] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/paasiaas&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZMt6xVIkuHbgIaGndRPFEQAAAMo&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0

[15] https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/28/intel_q2_results/

[16] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/