# Amazon EC2 instance type naming conventions
<a name="instance-type-names"></a>

Amazon EC2 provides a variety of instance types so you can choose the type that best meets your requirements. Instance types are named based on their *instance family* and *instance size*. The first position of the instance family indicates the *series*, for example `c`. The second position indicates the *generation*, for example `7`. The third position indicates the *options*, for example `gn`. After the period (`.`) is the instance size, such as `small` or `4xlarge`, or `metal` for bare metal instances.

![The image shows the instance type c7gn.xlarge, with a label for each part of the instance name.](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ec2/latest/instancetypes/images/instance-type-naming-convention.png)



| Series | Options | 
| --- | --- | 
|  +  **A** – Powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton processors <br />+  **C** – Compute optimized <br />+  **D** – Dense storage <br />+  **F** – FPGA <br />+  **G** – Graphics intensive <br />+  **Hpc** – High performance computing <br />+  **I** – Storage optimized <br />+  **Im** – Storage optimized (1 to 4 ratio of vCPU to memory) <br />+  **Is** – Storage optimized (1 to 6 ratio of vCPU to memory) <br />+  **Inf** – AWS Inferentia <br />+  **M** – General purpose <br />+  **Mac** – macOS <br />+  **P** – GPU accelerated <br />+  **R** – Memory optimized <br />+  **T** – Burstable performance <br />+  **Trn** – AWS Trainium <br />+  **U** – High memory <br />+  **VT** – Video transcoding <br />+  **X** – Memory intensive <br />+  **Z** – High memory   |  +  **a** – AMD processors <br />+  **b{{\*}}00** \| **gb{{\*}}00** – Accelerated by NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs <br />+  **g** – AWS Graviton processors <br />+  **i** – Intel processors <br />+  **m{{\*}}** \| **m{{\*}}pro**– Apple chip <br />+  **b** – Block storage optimization <br />+  **d** – Instance store volumes <br />+  **e** – Extra instance storage (for storage optimized instance types), extra memory (for memory optimized instance types), or extra GPU memory (for accelerated computing instance types). <br />+  **flex** – Flex instance <br />+  **n** – Network and EBS optimized <br />+  **q** – Qualcomm inference accelerators <br />+  **{{\*}}tb** – Amount of memory for high-memory instances (3 TiB to 32 TiB) <br />+  **z** – High CPU frequency   |