AWS announced the general availability of Amazon EC2 C9g and C9gd instances, powered by custom-built AWS Graviton5 processors. These instances offer up to 30% better compute performance compared to Graviton4-based C8g instances, making them suitable for compute-intensive workloads like HPC, gaming, and media processing.
Background
AWS Graviton5 is Amazon's fifth-generation custom processor (based on Arm architecture) designed for its cloud data centers, competing with Intel/AMD x86 chips. It uses the Armv9.2 microarchitecture (Neoverse V2 core), offering up to 20-35% performance improvement over Graviton4. C9g/C9gd instances target compute-intensive workloads (e.g., video encoding, scientific modeling, high-performance computing). "C" stands for compute-optimized; "9g" indicates Graviton5 generation; "d" means local NVMe SSD storage. AWS announced Graviton5 at re:Invent 2024. These instances matter because AWS is the largest cloud provider, and its move to custom Arm chips is pressuring Intel/AMD and making Arm a serious data-center architecture. Available in 22 AWS regions — US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland, Frankfurt, London), Asia Pacific (Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney, Mumbai), and more. Supported operating systems: Amazon Linux 2023, RHEL 9.4+, Ubuntu 24.04+, Debian 12+, SuSE 15 SP6+, and Rocky Linux 9.4+.