Intel x86 chips power Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) newest EC2 instances designed for general-purpose compute.

The newly available Amazon EC2 M6i instances, which use third-generation Intel Xeon scalable processors, “offer up to a 15% improvement in price/performance vs comparable fifth-generation M5 instances using an Intel processor,” AWS Chief Evalgalist Danilo Poccia wrote in a blog post.

He also noted the “i” in “M6i” stands for Intel. “We already use the suffix ‘a’ for AMD processors (for example, M5a instances) and ‘g’ for Graviton processors (for example, M6g instances),” Poccia wrote.

The move comes a year after AWS rolled out its first round of sixth-generation EC2 instances, which were powered by AWS-designed Graviton2 processors. The public cloud giant also plans to roll out AMD-based M6 instances later this year. In an earlier blog post, Geoff Murase, AWS senior partner marketing Manager, said that these EC2 instances will be based on third-generation AMD EPYC processors.

The sixth-generation, Intel-powered compute instances are designed for workloads including web and application servers, containerized applications, microservices, and small data stores. Compared to an M5 instance based on Intel chips, the M6i provides up to 20% higher memory bandwidth, 40 Gb/s for Amazon Elastic Block, and 50 Gb/s for networking, according to AWS. The new instances also feature always-on memory encryption. Plus they are SAP certified.

EC2 M6i instances achieve these performance improvements in part because they are built on the AWS Nitro System, Poccia explained. This system is a collection of building blocks that offloads many of the traditional virtualization functions to dedicated hardware.

In addition to the performance benefits, the Intel processors provide AWS customers with improved total cost of ownerships compared to M5 instances because they offer higher per-core performance, built-in artificial intelligence acceleration, and built-in crypto acceleration, according to an Intel blog about the partnership.