For Amazon Inc., infrastructure-as-a-service is not just about chasing Moore’s law. The latest proof of that came this week in the form of a new iteration of its general-purpose instances that propels the core count deep into double-digit territory and upgrades the underlying silicon to a custom variation of Intel’s newest E5-2676 v3 Haswell architecture.

The M4 picks up where the dual-vCPU m3.large option in its predecessor series leaves off, adding another half gigabyte of memory for a round total of eight and replacing the 32 gigabytes of attached flash storage with 450Mbps worth of dedicated throughput. That pattern continues up the scale all the way to the top.

At the end of the compute ladder is the m4.10xlarge, which comfortably lives up to its designation. It comes with no fewer than 40 virtual cores – even more than the most expensive configuration of the C4 series that Amazon launched earlier this year specifically with processor-intensive workloads in mind – and 160 gigabytes of memory to go along.

Also included in the $2.5 hourly price is a speedy 10Gbps connection and 4,000Mbps worth of throughput. The retail-turned-cloud giant envisions the new M4 series used primarily for running single-tenant workloads, such as a database supporting a medium-sized organization that’s too large to fit inside M3 instance, and borrows some functionality from the C4 family to support such use cases.

Customers can tune the power consumption of individual cores so that when their application only utilizes a handful, the rest deactivate to create the thermal headway needed to let the active ones overclocking. That makes it possible to increase the E5-2676 v3’s base clock speed of 2.4 GHz to as much as 3.0 GHz depending on what best suits the workload, likewise on a core-by-core basis.

And in continuation of its price-cutting tradition, Amazon is accompanying the launch with a five percent slash to M3 and C4 instances. The cuts apply immediately for  on-demand customers and  instances booked under long-term contracts after June 11.

Photo via AWS