Is xrt_202410.2.17.0_20.04-amd64-aws.deb for AWS F1 or F2 Instances?

The file xrt_202410.2.17.0_20.04-amd64-aws.deb is intended for use with F2 instances, not F1 instances. F2 instances are the second-generation FPGA-powered instances offered by AWS, designed for faster FPGA accelerator development and deployment in the cloud. They offer improved performance and capabilities compared to the first-generation F1 instances.

It's important to note that for new FPGA instance users, AWS recommends using F2 instances instead of F1. F2 instances provide better price performance, more advanced FPGAs, and are the current standard for FPGA-based computing on AWS.

If you're looking to work with FPGA instances on AWS, you should focus on F2 instances unless you have a specific reason to use F1. The XRT (Xilinx Runtime) package you mentioned is likely part of the development toolkit for F2 instances, which includes tools for simulating, building, and registering Amazon FPGA Images (AFIs) for use with these instances.
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F2
Fail to create EC2 F1 instance | AWS re:Post

The file xrt_202410.2.17.0_20.04-amd64-aws.deb is intended for use with F2 instances, not F1 instances. F2 instances are the second-generation FPGA-powered instances offered by AWS, designed for faster FPGA accelerator development and deployment in the cloud. They offer improved performance and capabilities compared to the first-generation F1 instances.

It's important to note that for new FPGA instance users, AWS recommends using F2 instances instead of F1. F2 instances provide better price performance, more advanced FPGAs, and are the current standard for FPGA-based computing on AWS.

The AWS EC2 FPGA Development Kit contains the tools that you will use to develop, simulate, debug, compile, and run your hardware-accelerated FPGA applications. You can launch the kit’s FPGA Developer AMI on a memory-optimized or compute-optimized instance for development and simulation, then use an F2 instance for final debugging and testing.

The tools included in the developer kit support a variety of development paradigms, tools, accelerator languages, and debugging options. Regardless of your choice, you will ultimately create an Amazon FPGA Image (AFI) which contains your custom acceleration logic and the AWS Shell which implements access to the FPGA memory, PCIe bus, interrupts, and external peripherals. You can deploy AFIs to as many F2 instances as desired, share with other AWS accounts or publish on AWS Marketplace.

If you have already created an application that runs on F1 instances, you will need to update your development environment to use the latest AMD tools, then rebuild and validate before upgrading to F2 instances.

FPGA Instances in Action Here are some cool examples of how F1 and F2 instances can support unique and highly demanding workloads:

Genomics – Multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company AstraZeneca used thousands of F1 instances to build the world’s fastest genomics pipeline, able to process over 400K whole genome samples in under two months.

Satellite Communication – Satellite operators are moving from inflexible and expensive physical infrastructure (modulators, demodulators, combiners, splitters, and so forth) toward agile, software-defined, FPGA-powered solutions. Using the digital signal processor (DSP) elements on the FPGA, these solutions can be reconfigured in the field to support new waveforms and to meet changing requirements. Key F2 features such as support for up to 8 FPGAs per instance, generous amounts of network bandwidth, and support for the Data Plan Development Kit (DPDK) using Virtual Ethernet can be used to support processing of multiple, complex waveforms in parallel.

Analytics – NeuroBlade‘s SQL Processing Unit (SPU) integrates with Presto, Apache Spark, and other open source query engines, delivering faster query processing and market-leading query throughput efficiency when run on F2 instances.

Things to Know Here are a couple of final things that you should know about the F2 instances:

Regions – F2 instances are available today in the US East (N. Virginia) and Europe (London) AWS Regions, with plans to extend availability to additional regions over time.

Operating Systems – F2 instances are Linux-only.

Purchasing Options – F2 instances are available in On-Demand, Spot, Savings Plan, Dedicated Instance, and Dedicated Host form.

[+] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/f2/

We are retiring the F1 instances on December 20, 2025.

Only existing F1 customers who have run F1 instances anytime between Dec 2023 - Dec 2024 can restart or launch new F1 instances. Effective December 20, 2025, F1 instances or access data stored on F1 instance local storage will be no longer available. Please transfer any needed data stored in F1 instance local storage before December 20, 2025.

For full documentation, including a user guide, code snippets, and tutorials, see the AWS EC2 FPGA Development Kit User Guide, for more information refer here:

[+] https://github.com/aws/aws-fpga