Today, I am very excited to announce that the new AWS Graviton4-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R8g instances, that have been available in preview since re:Invent 2023, are now generally available to all. AWS offers more than 150 different AWS Graviton-powered Amazon EC2 instance types globally at scale, has built more than 2 million Graviton processors, and has more than 50,000 customers using AWS Graviton-based instances to achieve the best price performance for their applications.
AWS Graviton4 is the most powerful and energy efficient processor we have ever designed for a broad range of workloads running on Amazon EC2. Like all the other AWS Graviton processors, AWS Graviton4 uses a 64-bit Arm instruction set architecture. AWS Graviton4-based Amazon EC2 R8g instances deliver up to 30% better performance than AWS Graviton3-based Amazon EC2 R7g instances. This helps you to improve performance of your most demanding workloads such as high-performance databases, in-memory caches, and real time big data analytics.
Since the preview announcement at re:Invent 2023, over 100 customers, including Epic Games, SmugMug, Honeycomb, SAP, and ClickHouse have tested their workloads on AWS Graviton4-based R8g instances and observed significant performance improvement over comparable instances. SmugMug achieved 20-40% performance improvements using AWS Graviton4-based instances compared to AWS Graviton3-based instances for their image and data compression operations. Epic Games found AWS Graviton4 instances to be the fastest EC2 instances they have ever tested and Honeycomb.io achieved more than double the throughput per vCPU compared to the non-Graviton based instances that they used four years ago.
Let’s look at some of the improvements that we have made available in our new instances. R8g instances offer larger instance sizes with up to 3x more vCPUs (up to 48xl), 3x the memory (up to 1.5TB), 75% more memory bandwidth, and 2x more L2 cache over R7g instances. This helps you to process larger amounts of data, scale up your workloads, improve time to results, and lower your TCO. R8g instances also offer up to 50 Gbps network bandwidth and up to 40 Gbps EBS bandwidth compared to up to 30 Gbps network bandwidth and up to 20 Gbps EBS bandwidth on Graviton3-based instances.
R8g instances are the first Graviton instances to offer two bare metal sizes (metal-24xl and metal-48xl). You can right size your instances and deploy workloads that benefit from direct access to physical resources. Here are the specs for R8g instances:
| Instance Size | vCPUs |
Memory |
Network Bandwidth |
EBS Bandwidth |
| r8g.medium | 1 | 8 GiB | up to 12.5 Gbps | up to 10 Gbps |
| r8g.large | 2 | 16 GiB | up to 12.5 Gbps | up to 10 Gbps |
| r8g.xlarge | 4 | 32 GiB | up to 12.5 Gbps | up to 10 Gbps |
| r8g.2xlarge | 8 | 64 GiB | up to 15 Gbps | up to 10 Gbps |
| r8g.4xlarge | 16 | 128 GiB | up to 15 Gbps | up to 10 Gbps |
| r8g.8xlarge | 32 | 256 GiB | 15 Gbps | 10 Gbps |
| r8g.12xlarge | 48 | 384 GiB | 22.5 Gbps | 15 Gbps |
| r8g.16xlarge | 64 | 512 GiB | 30 Gbps | 20 Gbps |
| r8g.24xlarge | 96 | 768 GiB | 40 Gbps | 30 Gbps |
| r8g.48xlarge | 192 | 1,536 GiB | 50 Gbps | 40 Gbps |
| r8g.metal-24xl | 96 | 768 GiB | 40 Gbps | 30 Gbps |
| r8g.metal-48xl | 192 | 1,536 GiB | 50 Gbps | 40 Gbps |
If you are looking for more energy-efficient compute options to help you reduce your carbon footprint and achieve your sustainability goals, R8g instances provide the best energy efficiency for memory-intensive workloads in EC2. Additionally, these instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, which offloads CPU virtualization, storage, and networking functions to dedicated hardware and software to enhance the performance and security of your workloads. The Graviton4 processors offer you enhanced security by fully encrypting all high-speed physical hardware interfaces.
R8g instances are ideal for all Linux-based workloads including containerized and micro-services-based applications built using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), Amazon Elastic Container Registry (Amazon ECR), Kubernetes, and Docker, and as well as applications written in popular programming languages such as C/C++, Rust, Go, Java, Python, .NET Core, Node.js, Ruby, and PHP. AWS Graviton4 processors are up to 30% faster for web applications, 40% faster for databases, and 45% faster for large Java applications than AWS Graviton3 processors. To learn more, visit the AWS Graviton Technical Guide.
Check out the collection of Graviton resources to help you start migrating your applications to Graviton instance types. You can also visit the AWS Graviton Fast Start program to begin your Graviton adoption journey.
Now available
R8g instances are available today in the US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt) AWS Regions.
You can purchase R8g instances as Reserved Instances, On-Demand, Spot Instances, and via Savings Plans. For further information, visit Amazon EC2 pricing.
To learn more about Graviton-based instances, visit AWS Graviton Processors or the Amazon EC2 R8g Instances.