AWS has recently released the EC2 C8g and M8g instances, powered by the latest Graviton4 processors. The general-purpose M8g and compute-intensive C8g instances are designed to deliver up to 30% better performance compared to Graviton3-based instances, with a cost increase of approximately 10% over the previous M7g and C7g generations.
Graviton4-based X8g instances, targeted at memory-intensive workloads, have been generally available for a few months. However, the general-purpose (M) and compute-intensive (C) EC2 classes are traditionally among the most popular. With the latest announcement, the newest Graviton processor—developed by Amazon subsidiary Annapurna Labs—is now available for a broader range of customers and use cases.
According to AWS, R8g instances deliver up to 30% better performance than the seventh-generation Graviton3-based R7g instances. They also offer instance sizes with up to 192 vCPUs (96 cores) and 1536 GB of memory, providing a significantly larger single-server capacity than previous generations. While the general-purpose M8g instances are suited for most web servers, the C8g instances are ideal for compute-intensive workloads such as high-performance computing (HPC), batch processing, gaming, video encoding, scientific modeling, distributed analytics, CPU-based machine learning inference, and ad serving. Veliswa Boya, senior developer advocate at AWS, writes:
The C8g and M8g instances are ideal for Linux-based workloads including containerized and microservices-based applications such as those running on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), as well as applications written in popular programming languages such as C/C++, Rust, Go, Java, Python, .NET Core, Node.js, Ruby, and PHP.
Boya notes that the new processor, powered by Arm Neoverse V2 cores, is 40% faster in database applications and 45% faster in Java applications, adding:
These instances also offer up to 50 Gbps network bandwidth and up to 40 Gbps Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) bandwidth compared to up to 30 Gbps network bandwidth and up to 20 Gbps Amazon EBS bandwidth on Graviton3-based instances.
While the cloud provider emphasizes the improved efficiency and sustainability of the new processor, many users in a popular hardware review on AnandTech question how these improvements were achieved, as few hardware details were released. Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, points out the shift in the cloud provider’s pricing strategy in recent years and writes:
Good launch. However, if I upgrade my dev/utility instance from its current c7g.large to a c8g.large, it will increase its cost by over 9%. The machine is usually bored; there's no "but you make better price/performance gains" argument to be had here--it's strictly a price hike.
In a press release this summer, Amazon announced that customers such as SAP, Epic Games (the operator of Fortnite), and SmugMug are already using Graviton4-based instances.
Although the new instances are designed for a wide range of workloads, the C8g and M8g classes are currently available in only a small subset of AWS regions: Ohio, Northern Virginia, Oregon, and Frankfurt. Some developers have noted on Reddit that they may only be available in some availability zones within these regions.
