Amazon EC2 F1 Instance Expands to More Regions, Adds New Features, and Improves Development Tools
Today we are excited to announce new features and updated capabilities that allow developers to build higher performance and feature-rich hardware accelerators using Amazon EC2 F1 instances.
Following strong customer demand, EC2 F1 instances are available in 3 new AWS Regions: Europe (London and Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Sydney). These new regions allow customers to run FPGA based accelerators in their own countries to meet their data governance requirements. These new regions are currently available as a private preview. If you're interested in participating in the private preview, please write to us at f1-interest@amazon.com.
Historically, customers have deployed network appliances to implement advanced networking capabilities using embedded FPGAs. With F1 instances, customers can now implement high performance hardware acceleration in networking applications such as firewalls, routers, and advanced security appliances using Virtual Ethernet. With Virtual Ethernet, developers can now build accelerators that process network packets directly from user-space on the FPGA with high throughput and low-latency.
We are also pleased to announce general availability of DRAM data retention, which enables developers to swap Amazon FPGA images (AFIs) at runtime much faster than before and with less data orchestration complexity. With DRAM data retention, developers can simply load a new AFI and continue using the data that persists in the FPGA attached DRAM, eliminating unnecessary data movement and significantly improving overall application performance.
Finally, we have also upgraded cloud FPGA development tools with a new FPGA developer AMI version 1.5.0. The new FPGA developer AMI supports the latest 2018.2 Vivado from Xilinx, that provides better frequencies and faster build times compared to previous versions for congested designs, improved timing closure, and various usability improvements. These new AMI improvements are available to developers at no additional charge.
All of these new capabilities and upgrades are available for F1 instances in all AWS supported regions - US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and AWS GovCloud (US) regions. Previews are available in Europe (Frankfurt and London) and Asia Pacific (Sydney) AWS Regions. For a complete list of new features and upgrades, please click here.