AWS launches Graviton4 instances

Amazon Web Services announced the launch of its fourth-generation, Arm-based Graviton CPU, touting its energy efficiency and high performance for cloud workloads.

AWS launched Graviton in 2018 and has built four generations of the processor in six years, which is an admirable achievement for a company that previously had no silicon development expertise. Since its launch, Graviton has attracted more than 50,000 customers, according to Amazon.

“AWS offers more than 150 different AWS Graviton-powered Amazon EC2 instance types globally at scale, has built more than 2 million Graviton processors, and has more than 50,000 customers using AWS Graviton-based instances to achieve the best price performance for their applications,” wrote Esra Kayabali, senior solutions architect at AWS, in a blog post about the launch of AWS Graviton4-based Amazon EC2 R8g instances.

Graviton4 offers a significant performance upgrade over Graviton3, with 30% better computing power, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth. The new Graviton4 instances, called R8g, support up to 8GB of memory per virtual processor and up to 192 processors.

R8g also offers up to 50 Gbps network bandwidth and up to 40 Gbps EBS bandwidth compared to up to 30 Gbps network bandwidth and up to 20 Gbps EBS bandwidth on Graviton3-based R7g instances.

R8g instances are designed for all manner of Linux-based workloads, including containerized and micro-services-based applications using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and high-end workloads like high-performance databases, in-memory caches, and real time big data analytics.

AWS previewed Graviton4 at its re:Invent 2023 conference, and since then, more than 100 customers have tested their workloads on AWS Graviton4-based R8g instances, according to Kayabali. “SmugMug achieved 20-40% performance improvements using AWS Graviton4-based instances compared to AWS Graviton3-based instances for their image and data compression operations. Epic Games found AWS Graviton4 instances to be the fastest EC2 instances they have ever tested and Honeycomb.io achieved more than double the throughput per vCPU compared to the non-Graviton based instances that they used four years ago,” Kayabali wrote.

Amazon also claims R8g instances provide the best energy efficiency for memory-intensive workloads in EC2, but it did not give numbers or specifics.

R8g instances will be rolled out across different Amazon zones over time. They’re currently available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt).