Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the general accessibility of its sixth generation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances with three new instances powered by AWS-designed, Arm-based Gravitation2 processors. Amazon said that these instances deliver up to 40% better performance/price over comparable current-generation x86-based instances.
Categorization of the sixth generation of Amazon E2 instances includes M6g instances, C6g instances, and R6g instances.
The new instances were announced last year and are meant for compute-intensive workloads, which include CPU-based machine learning inference, distributed analytics, high-performance computing, video encoding, and scientific modeling.
“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,” said David Brown, Vice President, Amazon EC2, at AWS. “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.
The instances are powered by the company’s new 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and custom-made silicon. Compared to AWS first-generation Graviton processors, the new chips offer just the double floating-point performance to boost computing and scientific workloads. It is equipped with the ability to speed up machine learning interface and encryption performance to boost security.
The clientele of AWS is worth taking a note. Netflix is the world’s leading internet entertainment service, with 158 million memberships in 190 countries watching TV series, documentaries, and feature films across a wide variety of genres and languages. “We use Amazon EC2 M instance types for a number of workloads inclusive of our streaming, encoding, data processing, and monitoring applications,” said Ed Hunter, Director of Performance and Operating Systems at Netflix. “We tested the new M6g instances using industry-standard LMbench and certain Java benchmarks and saw up to 50% improvement over M5 instances. We’re excited about the introduction of AWS Graviton2-based Amazon EC2 instances,” he added.
All M6g, C6g, and R6g instances are built on Amazon’s Nitro System. This system is said to be a collection of custom-designed hardware and software technologies enabling the company to deliver flexible and secure cloud services.
About Amazon Web Services (AWS)
It is one of the world’s best comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers more than 175 fully featured services for computers, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). It has a list of customers, including fastest-growing start-ups, large enterprises, and government agencies, that trust the company for powering their infrastructure and rendering agility at low cost.
