Introducing Premium Droplets with faster Intel and AMD CPUs and NVMe SSD

Rockstar Tom Petty put it this way: “the waiting is the hardest part.”

What a simple and profound statement that we all know to be true.

Every nanosecond your customers wait is hard on them, and can ultimately be so frustrating that they quit using your app in search of a faster or more responsive alternative.

That’s why we’re introducing Premium Droplets with faster Intel and AMD CPUs, along with NVMe SSD. With these new Droplets, you can be certain that you’re running your apps with modern hardware that delivers the fast performance your customers demand and deserve.

Our latest, greatest CPUs and modern, high performance disks

Premium Droplets are guaranteed to utilize some of the newest CPUs we have in our fleet.

• Intel Premium Droplets currently run second generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, which feature what’s commonly referred to as the Cascade Lake architecture. These Intel CPUs operate at a base frequency of 2.50 GHz and max turbo frequency of 3.90 GHz.
• AMD Premium Droplets currently run 2nd Generation AMD EPYC™ processors, based upon the “Zen 2” architecture, which feature what’s commonly referred to as the Rome architecture. These AMD EPYC CPUs operate at a base frequency of 2.0 GHz and a max turbo frequency of 3.35 GHz.

One important aspect of our new Premium Droplets is their enhanced memory performance, which can play a significant factor in workloads like in-memory databases and server-side caches for web apps. Our Premium AMD Droplets feature memory frequency of 3200 MHz, and Premium Intel 2933 MHz.

As for the disk aspect of your Premium Droplets – NVMe SSDs take advantage of parallelism to deliver disk performance that can be an order of magnitude faster than regular SSDs. If you’re running workloads that require a large number of transactions, you’ll achieve much lower latency with NVMe SSDs.

More speed, same simplicity

Our commitment to simplicity is reflected in all we do, and we’ve applied our usual developer-friendly aesthetic to these new offerings. With today’s launch, when you go to the control panel to spin up Droplets, you’ll see new options for Premium Intel and AMD within our Basic plan. You can also find slugs for Premium Droplets for use with our CLI, API, or extensions like our Terraform provider.

You can also use Premium Droplets as worker nodes with DigitalOcean Kubernetes.

Get started with Premium Droplets today

With today’s launch, Premium Intel Droplets are available in all of our global data center regions. AMD is in three locations to start, with more coming in the months ahead.

We hope you’re as excited about these new Premium Droplets as we are. You’re welcome to spin some up right now, or resize from Regular to Premium Intel – why wait?