Last year, AMD-based instances came into existence on Amazon Web Service’s (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). AMD brought a slight performance decrease and a reasonable price discount. CF Webtools is mostly website focused, and almost all of our servers have no problem going with that decreased performance metric.

Since EC2 was created, they’ve used abbreviations, such as “M1” for general purpose (think Main) and T1 for burstable (think Turbo). The characters are the instance class, and the numbers are the generations.

Then in 2020 came the AMD, such as M5a, which appended the “a”. This year came Graviton, powered by Arm-based processors, such as M6g, which appended the “g”.

From day one, any abbreviation that lacked the last character was an Intel processor. The sixth generation has changed that. Now you will start to see “i” appended, if it runs Intel, to flow with the “a” and “g”.

There are other characters in these abbreviations, but that’s for another day.

On August 15th, 2021, AWS introduced M6i instances.