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Green with NVMe: AWS adds more Arm-powered instance types

Local SSD block-level storage comes to EC2 instances powered by home-brew Graviton2 CPUs

Amazon Web Services has created three more EC2 instance types that run its home-grown Graviton2 Arm-compatible processors.

The new instances are variants of the M6g, R6g, and C6g instances that the cloud colossus currently offers for general-purpose compute, memory-intensive applications, and compute-intensive workloads, respectively. And the main new feature is the addition of local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage. Adding this support ought to make the three instance types faster for storage-bound workloads. And who doesn’t want faster?

It’s also tough to reject cheaper? AWS claims they “deliver up to 40% better price performance and 50% more NVMe storage GB/vCPU over comparable x86-based instances for a wide variety of workloads.”

And of course Arm CPU cores tend to use less power than their rivals, so this new lot could let you go green with NVMe.

OK, now that we got that joke out of the way, some details:

  • The new instances add a “d” to the current instance types, so we get the C6gd, M6gd, and R6gd
  • The new storage option applies to all sizes of existing Graviton2-powered instance types
  • SSD sizes range from 59GB to 1900GB
  • The d-instances are available in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), US East (Ohio) and Europe (Ireland) regions.

The new instance types deliver on AWS’ promise to extend its range Graviton2-powered servers because the internet goliath believes that innovation on Arm will outpace efforts around x86. With Intel this week admitting its efforts to adopt 7nm manufacturing processes have foundered badly, AWS’ thinking looks prescient. ®

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