Last night, we switched our default machine type from Amazon's c1.medium (2 core) instances, to x1.large.

These new machines are featuring 8 cores, 7 GB memory, better I/O performance and 64-bit architecture.

If you are performing Assemblies that are heavy on encoding, especially those involving multiple output formats, you should see a significant boost in encoding speed.

Unless something comes up, our plan is to only use 8-core machines in production going forward. And who knows, the Cluster Compute Instances (cc1.4xlarge) are only one step away now. 😄

Stay tuned!