AWS is making its EC2 instances based on its own Graviton 4 chips generally available. They are required to be up to thirty percent more efficient than their predecessors.

Amazon EC2 r8g instances built with AWS’s own Graviton 4 chips are generally available. AWS announced Graviton 4 and its instances at Re:Invent last year and has already provided access through a preview program. Now AWS hopes to increase excitement for the ARM-based technology even further.

ARM chip

Like previous editions of Graviton, this chip is based on a 64-bit ARM architecture. The chip features 96 Arm Neoverse VS cores with 2MB of L2 cache in each core. Combined with the twelve DDR5-5600 channels, Graviton4 can deliver up to forty percent faster performance for database applications than its predecessor.

The EC2 r8g instances use at least one Graviton 4 vCPU (giving you a small virtual machine with one compute core). You can also configure them with twice the number of cores, up to a maximum of 96 vCPUs in the r8g.24xlarge, making the entire Graviton 4 chip available.

AWS offers a larger option with r8g.48xlarge, where the manufacturer combines two Graviton 4 CPUs in a dual-socket configuration for a total of 192 processing cores. The options, which completely reduce the capacity of one or two chips, are also available in a bare-metal variant.

More efficient than x86

AWS says the r8g instances are up to thirty percent more efficient than their Graviton 3-based predecessors. The cloud giant also points out that the ARM architecture is more economical for most workloads, thus reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

According to AWS, the r8g instances are ideal for Linux workloads, including container applications and microservices. Native applications written in common languages ​​such as /C++, Rust, Go, Java, Python, .NET Core, Node.js, Ruby and PHP would also run more efficiently on Graviton than on classic x86 instances with processors from Intel or AMD. Finally, according to the hyperscaler, Graviton 4 excels in database applications.

AWS r8g instances are generally available in the Europe (Frankfurt) Region and in the US in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon) Regions.

ARM pioneer

AWS has been using servers with its own ARM chips for more than five years and has proven the added value of Graviton and the ARM architecture in the cloud during this time. The cloud giant pioneered ARM in the server space, but all of its major competitors are now following suit. ARM still has a long way to go in the PC market, although Apple’s M chips have now established themselves. Microsoft also seems to finally be using ARM in a sustainable way.