Since the launch of AWS Graviton processors in 2018, we have continued to innovate and deliver improved performance for our customers’ cloud workloads. Following the success of our Graviton3-based instances, we are excited to announce three new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance families powered by AWS Graviton4 processors with NVMe-based SSD local storage: compute optimized (C8gd), general purpose (M8gd), and memory optimized (R8gd) instances. These instances deliver up to 30% better compute performance, 40% higher performance for I/O intensive database workloads, and up to 20% faster query results for I/O intensive real-time data analytics than comparable AWS Graviton3-based instances.

Let’s look at some of the improvements that are now available in our new instances. These instances offer larger instance sizes with up to 3x more vCPUs (up to 192 vCPUs), 3x the memory (up to 1.5 TiB), 3x the local storage (up to 11.4TB of NVMe SSD storage), 75% higher memory bandwidth, and 2x more L2 cache compared to their Graviton3-based predecessors. These features help you to process larger amounts of data, scale up your workloads, improve time to results, and lower your total cost of ownership (TCO). These instances also offer up to 50 Gbps network bandwidth and up to 40 Gbps Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) bandwidth, a significant improvement over Graviton3-based instances. Additionally, you can now adjust the network and Amazon EBS bandwidth on these instances by up to 25% using EC2 instance bandwidth weighting configuration, providing you greater flexibility with the allocation of your bandwidth resources to better optimize your workloads.

Built on AWS Graviton4, these instances are great for storage intensive Linux-based workloads including containerized and micro-services-based applications built using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), Kubernetes, and Docker, as well as applications written in popular programming languages such as C/C++, Rust, Go, Java, Python, .NET Core, Node.js, Ruby, and PHP. AWS Graviton4 processors are up to 30% faster for web applications, 40% faster for databases, and 45% faster for large Java applications than AWS Graviton3 processors.

Instance specifications
These instances also offer two bare metal sizes (metal-24xl and metal-48xl), allowing you to right size your instances and deploy workloads that benefit from direct access to physical resources. Additionally, these instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, which offloads CPU virtualization, storage, and networking functions to dedicated hardware and software to enhance the performance and security of your workloads. In addition, Graviton4 processors offer you enhanced security by fully encrypting all high-speed physical hardware interfaces.

The instances are available in 10 sizes per family, as well as two bare metal configurations each:

*Memory values are for C8gd/M8gd/R8gd respectively

Availability and pricing
M8gd, C8gd, and R8gd instances are available today in US East (N. Virginia, Ohio) and US West (Oregon) Regions. These instances can be purchased as On-Demand instances, Savings Plans, Spot instances, or as Dedicated instances or Dedicated hosts.

Get started today
You can launch M8gd, C8gd and R8gd instances today in the supported Regions through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or AWS SDKs. To learn more, check out the collection of Graviton resources to help you start migrating your applications to Graviton instance types. You can also visit the Graviton Getting Started Guide to begin your Graviton adoption journey.

— Micah;

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