AMD launches on AWS and instantly undercuts Intel by 10%

AMD announced a double whammy at its Next Horizon event in San Francisco: first by announcing EPYC processor-based instances were now available on AWS, and second by undercutting Intel Xeon-based instances by 10%.

"Our goal with EPYC is to reach the largest number of users possible, and the cloud is the tip of that sphere," said AMD president and CEO, Dr Lisa Su. "To do that, we must partner with the number one cloud service provider in the world."

That partner is of course Amazon, with the company's vice president of computing services, Matt Garman, joining Dr Su on stage at Next Horizon.

"When we think about our compute platforms, there are a couple of things that are important to our customers," said Garman. "The very first thing is security, reliability and performance, and AMD is great on all of those fronts.

"The second thing that many customers come to AWS for is choice," he added. "We want to be the compute platform for the world, we want to support every single workload out there, and for that our customers need a broad range of capability."

But this was all a warm-up to AMD's big advantage over Intel: value for money. "But the final thing is frankly cost. I talk to a lot of customers, and never have I talked to a customer who wasn't interested in lower prices."

"I feel the same way," quipped Dr Su.

In practice, that means AWS customers in a number of regions, including Europe, can switch to AMD-based R5 sand M5 instances via the AWS Management Console or AWS Command Line Interface.

Amazon says T3 instances will be available "in a couple of weeks".

"One of the cool things about the cloud is that you can go and get them today," said Garman. "It's really easy. It's a simple API call to launch an instance. You can use the exact same instances you use today, you can use the exact same scripts.

"And one of the great things for our customers is that simply by making that change and switching, they can instantly save 10% on their compute costs."