Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud R8g instances with high-performance Graviton4 chips, which have been in testing since last November, are now available for anyone using AWS to use. AWS says it focused on energy efficiency in building Graviton4, as well as power and performance.
R8g instances are accessible in the AWS East US (N. Virginia), East US (Ohio), West US (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt) Regions.
Amazon EC2 R8g instances offer a choice of cloud processors
Amazon EC2 instances powered by Graviton are AWS cloud instances for servers and data centers. The Graviton4 processor delivers up to 30% better performance than AWS’s Graviton3-based Amazon EC2 R7g instances, according to AWS. That means Graviton4 processors are especially good for memory-intensive workloads such as high-performance databases, in-memory caches, and real-time big data analytics.
If you're looking to choose between processors for running cloud workloads on an Amazon EC2 instance, you're probably considering Intel and AMD's x86 architecture or the Graviton family (or Mac instances).
What does Graviton4 bring to Amazon EC2 R8g instances?
Amazon says the R8g instances with Graviton4 have improved over the R7g and Graviton3 instances in several ways:
- Up to 30% better performance for web applications.
- Up to 40% faster performance for databases.
- Up to 45% faster for large Java applications.
- Up to 3x more vCPUs (up to 48xl).
- 3x memory (up to 1.5TB).
- 75% more memory bandwidth.
- 2x more L2 cache than R7g instances.
- Network bandwidth up to 50Gbps compared to 30Gbps.
- EBS bandwidth up to 40Gbps compared to 20Gbps EBS.
R8g instances take advantage of offloaded CPU virtualization, storage, and networking features for improved performance and security. R8g instances can host applications written in all major programming languages as well as Linux-based workloads.
For the first time, Graviton instances will offer two bare metal sizes (metal-24xl and metal-48xl) on R8g instances.
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Graviton4 seeks to improve energy efficiency
According to a press release, AWS considers Graviton4 to be the “most energy-efficient processor we have ever designed.” Ways AWS has increased the efficiency of memory-intensive workloads using EC2 include offloading some CPU, storage, and network virtualization functions to dedicated hardware and software.
Is Amazon EC2 R8g Right for Your Business?
In addition to choosing between chips, as mentioned above, organizations looking to host high-performance workloads in the cloud have several options. Amazon EC2 cloud computing instances compete with other infrastructure-as-a-service providers, such as:
Other Amazon cloud computing services may be appropriate, depending on the size of your workload.
