C5 and C5d instances offer a choice of processors based on the size of the instance. The C5 and C5d 12xlarge, 24xlarge, and metal instances feature custom 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors (Cascade Lake) with a sustained all-core turbo frequency of 3.6GHz and maximum single core turbo frequency of 3.9GHz. The other C5 and C5d instance sizes will either launch on the 2nd generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processor or the 1st generation Intel Xeon Platinum 8000 series (Skylake-SP) processor with a sustained all core Turbo frequency of up to 3.4GHz, and single core turbo up to 3.5 GHz using Intel Turbo Boost Technology. C5 instances provide support for the new Intel Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (AVX-512) instruction set, offering up to 2x the FLOPS per core per cycle compared to the previous generation C4 instances. The C5 and C5d 12xlarge, 24xlarge, and metal instance sizes enable Vector Neural Network Instructions (AVX-512 VNNI*) which will help speed up typical machine learning operations like convolution, and automatically improve inference performance over a wide range of deep learning workloads.

C5a instances feature custom 2nd generation up to 3.3 GHz AMD EPYC 7002 series processors built on a 7nm process node for increased efficiency. C5a instances deliver leading x86 price-performance through a combination of high performance processing and 10% lower cost.

*VNNI may not be compatible with all Linux distributions. Please check documentation before using.

C5n instances leverage the fourth generation of custom Nitro card and Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) device to deliver 100 Gbps of network throughput to a single instance. These instances are ideal for network intensive applications, including HPC workloads, data lake and analytics software, and network appliances. C5n.9xlarge and 18xlarge instances support Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), to run tightly-coupled HPC applications at scale.

Local NVMe-based SSD block level storage physically connected to the host server is available on C5d and C5ad instances. These instances are a great fit for applications that need access to high-speed, low latency local storage like video encoding, image manipulation and other forms of media processing. It will also benefit applications that need temporary storage of data, such as batch and log processing and applications that need caches and scratch files.

The AWS Nitro System is a rich collection of building blocks that offloads many of the traditional virtualization functions to dedicated hardware and software to deliver high performance, high availability, and high security while also reducing virtualization overhead.