Announcing New Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g Instances Powered by Next-Generation Arm-based AWS Graviton2 Processors

Posted on: Dec 3, 2019

The new general purpose (M6g), compute optimized (C6g), and memory optimized (R6g) Amazon EC2 instances deliver up to 40% improved price/performance over current generation M5, C5, and R5 instances for a broad spectrum of workloads including application servers, open source databases, in-memory caches, microservices, gaming servers, electronic design automation, high-performance computing, and video encoding. These instances are powered by new AWS Graviton2 processors that use 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by AWS, built using advanced 7 nanometer manufacturing technology. AWS Graviton2 processors deliver several performance optimizations over the first generation AWS Graviton processors such as 7x performance, 4x the number of compute cores, 2x larger private caches per core, 5x faster memory, and 2x faster floating-point performance per core. Additionally, they feature always-on fully encrypted DDR4 memory to further enhance security and 50% faster per core encryption performance. AWS Graviton2 processors also support custom hardware acceleration for compression workloads, and optimized instructions for faster CPU-based machine learning inference.

Most applications built on Linux utilizing open-source software can run easily on multiple processor architectures and are well suited for the new instance types. Developers can also build Arm-based applications natively in the cloud while leveraging the flexibility, security, reliability, and scalability of running on EC2. These instances support up to 64 vCPUs, 25 Gbps of enhanced networking, 18 Gbps of EBS bandwidth, and are built on the AWS Nitro System, which is a collection of custom AWS hardware and software that enable the delivery of efficient, flexible, and secure cloud services. Customers can also choose NVMe SSD local instance storage (C6gd, M6gd, R6gd), or bare metal options for all of the three instances.

These new instances are supported by several open source software distributions (Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Fedora, Debian, FreeBSD, as well as the Amazon Corretto distribution of OpenJDK), container services (Docker Desktop, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS), agents (Cloudwatch, Systems Manager, Amazon Inspector), developer tools (AWS Code Suite, Jenkins), and an extensive ecosystem of Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) including Datadog and CrowdStrike.

M6g instances are now available in preview. C6g, M6g, R6g instances and disk variants will be generally available in the coming months. Learn more about AWS Graviton2 processors or request access to the M6g preview.