AWS has 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. 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.

Since their introduction a year ago, Arm-based Amazon EC2 A1 instances (powered by AWS's first generation Graviton processor) have provided customers running scale-out workloads (e.g. containerized microservices and web tier applications) with significant cost savings. Given the cost savings, along with the increasing Arm support from a broad ecosystem of operating system and independent software vendors, customers now want to be able to run more demanding workloads on AWS Graviton-based instances. These diverse workloads require enhanced capabilities beyond those supported by A1 instances, such as faster processing, higher memory capacity, increased networking bandwidth, and larger instance sizes. The M6g, C6g, and R6g instances are powered by new AWS-designed, Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors that offer up to 7x more performance, 4x more compute cores, and 5x faster memory than the A1 instances–while also delivering up to 40% better price/performance over comparable current generation x86-based instances.

“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.”

In addition to superior price/performance, AWS Graviton2 processors also introduce a number of powerful optimizations, features, and capabilities. AWS Graviton2 processors use 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by AWS, built using advanced 7 nanometer manufacturing technology. When compared to the first generation Graviton processors, AWS Graviton2 processors provide 2x faster floating point performance per core for scientific and high performance computing workloads, optimized instructions for faster machine learning inference, custom hardware acceleration for compression workloads, always-on fully encrypted DDR4 memory, and 50% faster per core encryption performance to further enhance security. AWS Graviton2-powered instances provide up to 64 vCPUs, 25 Gbps of enhanced networking, and 19 Gbps of EBS bandwidth. Already, AWS services like Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon Elastic Map Reduce have found superior price/performance in testing, and plan to move the services into production on Graviton2-based instances in the coming months.

M6g, C6g, and R6g instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, a collection of AWS-designed hardware and software innovations that enable the delivery of efficient, flexible, and secure cloud services with isolated multi-tenancy, private networking, and fast local storage. M6g, C6g, and R6g instances are available in a bare metal option for workloads that benefit from access to physical resources. These instances will also be available soon with a local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage option (M6gd, C6gd, and R6gd) for applications that need access to high-speed, low latency local storage. All AWS Graviton2-based instances are available to be purchased as On-Demand, Reserved Instances, Spot Instances, Savings Plans, or as Dedicated Hosts. All new AWS Graviton2-based instance types are supported by popular open source operating system distributions (Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Fedora, Debian, and FreeBSD), language runtimes (Amazon Corretto distribution of OpenJDK, NodeJS, Python, and Go), container services (Docker Desktop, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, and Amazon ECR), agents (Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Systems Manager, and Amazon Inspector), developer tools (AWS Code Suite, Chef, Drone.io, GitLab, Jenkins, and Travis CI), and security and monitoring solutions (CrowdStrike, Datadog, Honeycomb.io, Qualys, Rapid7, Tenable, and more). M6g, C6g, and R6g instances are generally available today and are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions, with availability in additional regions planned in the coming months.