Amazon Web Services on Thursday announced that EC2 M1 Mac instances are now available in preview. The new instances let developers access machines built around Apple’s custom-built M1 System on Chip (SoC), so they can re-architect their apps to support M1-powered Macs natively.
Amazon first launched Mac EC2 instances during re:Invent 2020. EC2 Mac instances are dedicated Mac mini computers attached via Thunderbolt to the AWS Nitro System, making the Mac mini appear and behave like another EC2 instance.
The new EC2 M1 Mac instances specifically use a Mac mini featuring an M1 SOC with 8 CPU cores, 8 GPU cores, 16GiB of memory, and a 16 core Apple Neural Engine. The AWS Nitro System delivers up to 10Gbps of VPC network bandwidth and 8 Gbps of EBS storage bandwidth.
The new M1 instances deliver up to 60% better price performance over the x86-based EC2 Mac instances for iPhone and Mac app build workloads, AWS said.
