AWS unveils new compute instances, including compute heavy C6gn powered by Graviton2
Amazon Web Services on Tuesday announced several new advancements to its compute portfolio. The key updates include five new instance types for Amazon EC2, two new AWS Outposts SKUs, and three new AWS Local Zones across the US.
The new Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances include new AWS Graviton2-powered C6gn instances, a compute-heavy instance that the company said can deliver 100 Gbps networking performance and provide 40% better price performance over comparable current generation x86-based instances.
The Graviton2, unveiled last year, is an Arm chip designed by the cloud provider and its Annapurna Labs unit. Graviton2 is optimized for cloud-native applications and is based on 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and a custom system on a chip designed by AWS.
Additional EC2 instance updates include:
- New AMD-powered G4ad GPU instances for graphics-intensive applications.
- New M5zn instances with Intel Xeon Scalable processors in the cloud with an all-core turbo frequency of up to 4.5 GHz and up to 45% better compute performance per core than current M5 instances.
- Next-generation Intel-powered D3/D3en instances for higher storage capacity for local HDD storage in the cloud.
- New memory-optimized R5b instances with 3x higher performance compared to same size R5 instances for Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS). AWS said R5b offers the fastest available block storage performance for Amazon EC2.
Meantime, AWS also announced two smaller AWS Outposts form factors, the 1U and 2U servers. AWS said the smaller form factors give customers access to AWS on-premises in space-constrained locations. AWS is also expanding AWS Local Zones to Boston, Houston and Miami, with plans to launch in 12 additional cities across the US in 2021.