Announcing metal-48xl and metal-96xl for Amazon EC2 network/EBS instances

Amazon Web Services has launched new metal-48xl and metal-96xl instance sizes for its eighth-generation EC2 compute instances, including M8in, M8ib, M8idn, M8idb, R8in, R8ib, R8idn, and R8idb families. These bare-metal instances are powered by custom sixth-generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors exclusively available on AWS and feature the latest sixth-generation AWS Nitro cards, delivering up to 43% better compute performance per vCPU compared to previous generation instances. The new instances come in two performance tiers optimized for different workloads. The M8in, M8idn, R8in, and R8idn variants provide 600 Gbps network bandwidth—the highest among AWS's enhanced networking EC2 instances—making them suitable for real-time big data analytics, distributed web-scale in-memory caches, AI/ML cluster caching, and 5G User Plane Function applications. Meanwhile, the M8ib, M8idb, R8ib, and R8idb instances offer up to 300 Gbps EBS bandwidth, targeting high-performance file systems, NoSQL databases, and data lakes that require substantial block storage performance. All new instance sizes support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) networking for reduced latency and improved performance in tightly coupled cluster deployments. The instances are initially available in AWS US East (Northern Virginia), with the 'dn' and 'db' variants including local NVMe storage for applications requiring both high throughput and low-latency local storage access.