Amazon EC2 C6g and R6g instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors are now generally available

Posted on: Jun 11, 2020

Starting today, the compute-optimized Amazon EC2 C6g instances and the memory-optimized Amazon EC2 R6g instances powered by Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors are generally available. Amazon EC2 C6g instances deliver up to 40% better price performance over x86-based Amazon EC2 C5 instances for compute-intensive workloads such as high performance computing (HPC), batch processing, ad serving, video encoding, gaming, scientific modelling, distributed analytics, and CPU-based machine learning inference. Amazon EC2 R6g instances deliver up to 40% better price performance over x86-based Amazon EC2 R5 instances for memory-intensive workloads such as open-source databases, in-memory caches, and real time big data analytics. 

AWS Graviton2 processors are custom-built by AWS using 64-bit Arm Neoverse N1 cores to enable the best price performance for cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2. They deliver a major leap in performance and capabilities over first-generation AWS Graviton processors, with 7x performance, 4x the number of compute cores, 2x larger caches, and 5x faster memory. AWS Graviton2 processors feature always-on 256-bit DRAM encryption and 50% faster per core encryption performance compared to the first-generation AWS Graviton processors.  

Amazon EC2 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. These instances provide up to 19 Gbps Elastic Block Store (EBS) bandwidth and up to 25 Gbps network bandwidth and are supported by a broad ecosystem of operating systems and services from Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) as well as AWS. These include popular Linux distributions (Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Fedora, and Debian), FreeBSD/NetBSD, the Amazon Corretto distribution of OpenJDK, container services (Amazon ECR, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Docker, and Rancher), agents (Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Systems Manager, Amazon Inspector, Crowdstrike, Datadog, Dynatrace, Honeycomb.io, Qualys, Rapid7, and Tenable), and developer/automation tools (AWS Code Suite, Chef, GitLab, Jenkins, and TravisCI).  

In addition to the newly available C6g and R6g instances, the general purpose M6g instances based on AWS Graviton2 processors are already available, and provide up to 40% better price performance over x86-based M5 instances for a broad set of workloads including application servers, microservices, gaming servers, small and mid-size databases, and caching fleets. Many customers have successfully adopted M6g instances with minimal effort and are realizing price performance benefits. The Amazon EC2 M6g webpage outlines several customer examples. 

The C6g and R6g instances are now available in the AWS US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt and Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions. They are available in 8 sizes, with 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 48, and 64 vCPUs in addition to the bare metal option, and are purchasable as part of Savings Plans, On-Demand, as Reserved instances, or as Spot instances.

To get started with AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances, visit the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (CLI), and AWS SDKs. To learn more, visit the AWS Graviton page, M6g page, C6g page, R6g page, or the Getting Started Github page. Additional Amazon EC2 instances based on the AWS Graviton2 processors with local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage will also be available in the coming months.