Amazon Web Services now offers Apple's M1 processor on the cloud, via dedicated Mac mini computers on the cloud.
The service has entered general availability in Amazon's US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Singapore) regions after six months in preview.
AWS first launched Mac instances back in 2020, but that version relied on Apple's Intel-powered hardware - featuring a six-core Intel Core i7 processor and 32GB of RAM.
Access to the Apple-designed M1 System on Chip (SoC) over the cloud is targeted at Mac developers looking to work with the new hardware, as well as developers building for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV will also benefit from faster builds.
Amazon said that its EC2 M1 Mac instances deliver up to 60 percent better price performance over the x86-based EC2 Mac instances for iPhone and Mac app build workloads.
In a blog post, AWS principal developer advocate Sébastien Stormacq detailed a trial project on EC2 M1 Mac. "The new EC2 M1 Mac instances complete this set of tasks in 49 seconds on average," Stormacq said. "This is 47.8 percent faster than the same set of tasks running on the previous generation of EC2 Mac instances."
Stormacq added that: "EC2 Mac instances are dedicated Mac mini computers attached through Thunderbolt to the AWS Nitro System, which lets the Mac mini appear and behave like another EC2 instance. It connects to your Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), boots from Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes, and uses EBS snapshots, Amazon Machine Images (AMIs), security groups and other AWS services such as Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Systems Manager."
