AWS Launches New EC2 Instances with Up to 25% Better Compute Performance

AWS has made its Amazon EC2 R9g and R9gd instances generally available, powered by Graviton5 processors. These new instances are ideal for memory-intensive workloads and offer up to 25% better compute performance compared to the previous generation of R8g instances.

The R9g instances have DDR5 8800 MT/s memory, which is the fastest memory available in the cloud, as well as a 5x larger L3 cache for better data locality. They also offer up to 2x higher network and EBS bandwidth for the largest instance sizes.

R9gd instances include local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage, making them ideal for workloads that require fast, low-latency local storage. The R9g and R9gd instances run on the AWS Nitro System, which offloads virtualization, storage, and networking to dedicated hardware, giving applications near-bare-metal performance while maintaining strong security isolation between instances.

AWS notes that no code changes are required for most applications migrating from R8g instances. The new instances support a range of major Linux distributions, including Amazon Linux 2023, Ubuntu 22.04+, and Debian 12+.