Amazon Web Services Inc. has made another addition to its infrastructure-as-a-service portfolio less than two weeks after the last major upgrade.

The cloud giant on Monday afternoon launched the C5 instance family, which is geared toward computationally intensive workloads such as batch analytics and video encoding. AWS said the series is 25 percent more cost-efficient than the older C4 machines that formed the centerpiece of AWS’s high-performance infrastructure lineup until now. For some applications, AWS Vice President Matt Garman said, the price-performance gain can top 50 percent.

The C5 series comes in six sizes. They range from the c5.large configuration, which offers 2 virtual processors plus 4 gibibytes of memory, to the top-end c5.18xlarge with its 72 virtual processors and 144 GiB RAM pool. (A gibibyte is another measure for memory size that is a little larger than a gigabyte.) In any case, AWS said that the latter instance is twice as powerful as anything in the previous-generation C4 lineup.

The extra performance comes from the new silicon running under the hood. AWS says that the C5 instances are based on Intel Corp.’s latest-generation Skylake SP processor series, which has already been adopted by rival cloud providers. The unit is a customized Xeon Platinum 8000 chip with a base clock speed of 3.0 GHz.

Another big change in C5 is that AWS powers the underlying infrastructure with a homegrown hypervisor built on the KVM virtualization technology for Linux. According to a FAQ page spotted by The Register, the company intends to roll out the software to other instance families as well further down the road. A hypervisor is software that creates and runs virtual machines, which emulate computer systems in software for more computing flexibility and efficiency.

This would suggest that AWS is transitioning away from the open-source Xen hypervisor it currently relies upon. Losing the support of the world’s top infrastructure-as-a-service provider would come as a blow to the project, especially since the move could potentially prompt other corporate adopters to start weighing alternatives as well.

AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post that more details will be disclosed about the new hypervisor at company’s annual re:Invent conference later this month. Customers can also expect a raft of new product announcements, if previous years are any indication.

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