New Graviton5-powered EC2 C9g/C9gd instances are here! 5x the cache and 3x packet processing

Hey friends, it's Shii! Today AWS delivered some big news: a new CPU-generation instance has arrived, so I'm excited to tell you all about it!

AWS Blog aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

AWS announced the general availability (GA) of two new Amazon EC2 instances powered by AWS Graviton5 processors: "C9g" and "C9gd." They're the latest generation of the compute-optimized instance family, designed for compute-intensive workloads.

The difference is that C9g comes with EBS storage configurations, while C9gd comes with local NVMe SSD storage. Both offer 11 sizes, from medium up to 48xlarge and even bare metal. For example, the largest c9g.48xlarge has specs of 192 vCPUs, 384 GiB of memory, 100 Gbps of network bandwidth, and 72 Gbps of EBS bandwidth, while the c9gd.48xlarge additionally comes with three 3800 GB NVMe storage drives.

For regions, they're first available in US East (Ohio, N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt), with plans to roll out to more regions going forward. You can launch them as usual from the AWS Management Console, the AWS CLI, and the AWS SDK.

The story so far

Until now, the mainstay of compute-optimized instances was C8g, powered by the previous-generation Graviton4. C8g was plenty fast, but for workloads like batch processing, distributed analytics, and video encoding, where the amount of computation keeps growing, there were situations where you wanted more cache capacity, memory bandwidth, and network throughput.

In particular, processing like the "agentic AI workloads" that have been on the rise lately, which involve concurrent processing and CPU-bound inference steps, tends to hit bottlenecks in CPU performance and headroom around memory.

What changes

Switching to C9g/C9gd starts to resolve these challenges. According to AWS, C9g instances deliver up to 25% higher performance per vCPU compared to C8g, and up to 3x higher packet processing performance compared to Graviton4-based instances. Network bandwidth is improved by 15% on average, and EBS bandwidth by 20% on average.

Thanks to this, people running compute-heavy workloads like HPC, scientific modeling, gaming, CPU-based machine learning inference, and ad-serving engines should be able to get higher throughput from instances of the same size. And if you choose C9gd, you can also use temporary space from local NVMe storage, so it adds a welcome option for workloads that want fast temporary storage, like video encoding pipelines.

Dive Deep

From here, let's dig into the technical details properly.

First, the heart of it: the AWS Graviton5 processor. Its L3 cache has been expanded to more than 5x the previous generation, and it uses DDR5 8800 MT/s DIMMs for memory. AWS describes it as "the fastest memory of any processor instance in the cloud." As for C9gd's local storage performance, it's said to be up to 30% higher compared to the previous generation's local storage instances.

On the networking and connectivity side, a feature called Instance Bandwidth Configuration (IBC) is available, letting you adjust the bandwidth allocation between EBS and the VPC network within a range of up to 25%. It also supports ENA Express, and being able to attach up to 128 EBS volumes to a single instance is a quietly nice point.

On the security side, it's worth noting that C9g/C9gd are the first compute-optimized instance types to feature the "Nitro Isolation Engine." This is a mechanism that enforces isolation between VMs, and it uses formal verification to guarantee that isolation with mathematical precision, which is some seriously hardcore technology.

There's progress on monitoring, too. Graviton5-powered instances support detailed NVMe statistics, and using CloudWatch or nvme-cli, you can get per-second latency histograms at no additional cost. I think it's a handy feature for anyone who wants to track down fine-grained bottlenecks around storage.

As for purchase options, you can use the same familiar choices as before: Savings Plans, On-Demand, Spot, and Dedicated Instances. For specific pricing, the original article points you to the Amazon EC2 pricing page, and it doesn't list the actual amounts, so if you're curious, check the official pricing page.

Wrap-up

So, today I covered the general availability of Amazon EC2 C9g/C9gd instances powered by AWS Graviton5 processors. Up to 25% higher performance per vCPU, over 5x the L3 cache, up to 3x packet processing, and even new isolation guarantees from the Nitro Isolation Engine: it's a generation packed with improvements for compute-intensive workloads. They're available first in three US regions and Europe (Frankfurt), so if you use any of those regions, I'd love for you to check them out.

Here's the original article; give it a read if you're curious.