Amazon's CPU rival to Intel and AMD spreading its wings globally

AWS has announced that the sixth generation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances are now generally available with three new instances powered by the company's own, Arm-based Graviton2 processors.

The new general purpose (M6g), compute-optimized (C6g) and memory-optimized (R6g) instances deliver up to 40 percent better price to performance over comparable current gen x86-based instances.

A year ago, AWS introduced Arm-based Amazon EC2 A1 instances powered by its first generation Graviton processor and they have provided customers running scale-out workloads or containerized microservices and web tier applications with significant savings. However, customers now want to be able to run even more demanding workloads on AWS Graviton-based instances which is why the company has released its new M6g, C6g and R6g instances.

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All of these instances are powered by AWS' new Graviton2 processors that offers up to seven times more performance, four times more computer cores and five times faster memory than A1 instances.

Graviton 2

In addition to offering better price for performance, AWS Graviton2 processors also introduce a number of powerful optimizations, features and capabilities. AWS' new processors use 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom silicon designed by the company, built using advanced 7 nanometer manufacturing technology.

When compared to first gen Graviton processors, Graviton2 processors provide two times faster floating point performance per core, optimized instructions for faster machine learning inference, customer hardware acceleration, always-on fully encrypted DDR4 memory and 50 percent faster per core encryption performance for enhances security.

Vice president of Amazon EC2 at AWS, David Brown provided further insight on the benefits of the company's new EC2 instances in a press release, saying:

“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. 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.”