Amazon Web Services announced the general availability of its sixth generation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with three new instances powered by AWS-designed, Arm-based Graviton2 processors.
Graviton2 is a custom AWS design that is built using a 7nm manufacturing process and based on 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores. AWS says it can deliver up to 7x the performance of the A1 instances, including twice the floating point performance. Additional memory channels and double-sized per-core caches speed memory access by up to 5x.
The new general purpose (M6g), compute-optimized (C6g), and memory-optimized (R6g) instances deliver up to 40% better price/performance over comparable current generation x86-based instances. These sixth generation Amazon EC2 instances include:
- M6g instances: designed for general-purpose workloads with balanced compute, memory, and networking, such as application servers, mid-size databases, microservices, and caching fleets.
- C6g instances: designed for compute-intensive workloads, such as high performance computing, batch processing, video encoding, gaming, scientific modeling, distributed analytics, ad-serving, and CPU-based machine learning inference.
- R6g instances: designed for workloads that process large data sets in memory, such as open source databases (MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL) or in-memory caches (Redis, Memcached, and KeyDB), and real-time big data analytics.
AWS said its Arm-based Amazon EC2 instances powered by Graviton processors are optimized for running scale-out workloads (e.g. containerized microservices and web tier applications).
“Today more than ever, customers are looking for innovative ways to increase performance and reduce cost, and Arm processors have emerged as an exciting and mainstream alternative to x86 processors for a wide variety of existing and emerging workloads,” said David Brown, Vice President, Amazon EC2, at AWS. “The new Amazon EC2 instances powered by AWS-designed, Arm-based, Graviton2 processors represent a significant generational leap for customers, delivering 40% better price/performance over comparable x86-based instances, and already we’ve seen a broad set of customers embrace them across a wide variety of general purpose, compute optimized, and memory optimized workloads.”
- Netflix is using Amazon EC2 M instance types for a number of workloads, including streaming, encoding, data processing, and monitoring applications.
