Amazon Web Services is releasing new EC2 C9g and C9gd instances, powered by the latest Graviton5 processors. The instances promise up to 25 percent higher performance per vCPU than the previous generation and are aimed at compute-intensive workloads such as analytics, video encoding, and AI agents.
AWS announces the general availability of C9g and C9gd instances within Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Both families run on Graviton 5 chips and are optimized for compute power. According to AWS, the processors feature the fastest memory of any chips in the cloud, with DDR5 memory at 8,800 MT/s and five times more L3 cache than Graviton4.
AWS launched Graviton 5 in December last year. The ARM-based chip is equipped with 192 compute cores and builds on four previous editions of Graviton. AWS uses its self-developed CPUs to offer an attractive price-performance proposition within its own cloud using the ARM architecture. For many workloads, instances with these chips are more cost-effective than x86 alternatives.
Performance and applications
The new C9g instances deliver up to three times higher packet processing than Graviton4-based variants. AWS positions the instances for batch processing, video encoding pipelines, and distributed analytics utilizing Amazon Elastic Block Store. AI agents orchestrating multiple steps also benefit from the higher core capacity and larger caches.
C9gd instances add local NVMe SSD storage with up to 30 percent higher storage performance than previous generations. According to AWS, this makes them suitable for scratch space in HPC simulations, temporary caches for ML inference, or local buffers for advertising services. Both families are available in eleven sizes, from medium to 48xlarge, plus a bare metal option.
Network bandwidth and isolation
The largest variant, C9g 48xlarge, has 192 vCPUs, 384 GiB of memory, up to 100 Gbps network bandwidth, and 72 Gbps EBS bandwidth. The bare metal configuration has similar specifications. The entry-level C9g medium option has 1 vCPU available with 2 GiB of memory.
The instances are the first compute-optimized EC2 instances featuring the AWS Nitro Isolation Engine, a component of the Nitro Hypervisor written in Rust that enforces isolation between virtual machines. The C9g and C9gd instances are now available in US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt). Additional regions will follow later.