Faster and more cost-efficient—
General Purpose with Intel® Xeon® 6900

In this article, you will read

• how to reduce costs when using T Cloud Public,
• what performance gains the new s9 flavors deliver
• and how to switch to the new flavors.

The anniversary year kicks off with a bang. After the latest Intel® Xeon® generation was introduced in December for memory-optimized and compute-optimized (Dedicated General Purpose) instances and flavors, the General Purpose family has now followed suit. As a result, T Cloud Public users benefit from significantly higher performance at no additional cost.

Every PC user knows it: the Olympic motto citius, altius, fortius (faster, higher, stronger) applies especially to IT. On the one hand, new hardware with greater performance becomes available every year. On the other, operating systems and application software grow steadily more demanding. Hardware and software are locked in a continuous race, constantly pushing one another forward.

This dynamic is even more pronounced in the cloud, where providers compete intensely on service portfolios, ease of use, pricing, and technical performance. Performance is particularly critical in high-performance computing, where higher throughput usually means lower costs.

At the same time, the growing volume of enterprise data, the need for rapid analytics, and rising customer experience expectations place increasing demands on cloud platforms. Horizontal and vertical scaling provide established mechanisms to manage both sustained and short-term workload growth, but these approaches naturally lead to higher costs.

Cloud providers must continuously refresh and expand their hardware landscapes. This creates an opportunity to increase performance without raising prices through the introduction of new processor generations. The outcome is straightforward: more performance for the same investment or, depending on the workload, tangible cost reductions.

In December 2025, the T Cloud Public team became one of the first cloud providers in Europe to introduce the latest Intel® Xeon® 6900 processors. These CPUs deliver a substantial performance boost—more details can be found in the previous post from November 2025. Compared to the previous generation, improvements are especially noticeable in compute power, memory connectivity, and data processing:

• Up to 40% higher overall performance compared to the previous generation.
• Significantly expanded L3 cache (up to 480 MB) for faster access to frequently used data.
• Memory bandwidth of up to 614 GB/s, particularly beneficial for parallel and data-intensive workloads.
• Increased VM-level network bandwidth (up to 30 Gbit/s outbound and 12 Gbit/s inbound).

The new ECS s9 flavors are now available, allowing General Purpose users to take full advantage of these performance gains. General Purpose instances are the all-rounders of the cloud and remain especially popular. They are well suited for applications that require a balanced mix of CPU, memory, and storage performance, such as application servers, web hosting, enterprise applications, and development environments. The latest processor architecture delivers consistent performance while improving cost efficiency by reducing resource overhead.

Detailed specifications are available here. The new chip generation also expands the range in this category: with up to 64 vCPUs, the maximum flavor size has doubled. In addition, Reserved Packages with a three-year term have been reintroduced. The pricing calculator enables direct comparison with previous generations.

New users can deploy infrastructure directly through the console or API using the new target instances. Existing customers can migrate workloads with minimal effort, particularly when container technologies are already in use.

Heads up: in the first quarter of 2026, selected s9 flavors will be rolled out alongside other ECS families with a special 20% discount. The discount applies to all instance types with up to four vCPUs, making it easy to gain hands-on experience with the new generation.

In Elastic mode, you can explore the new capabilities without long-term commitments. Launch instances, test application performance on the new architecture, and collect real-world performance data. Once you are satisfied with the results, you can transition to Reserved Instances.