[HN Gopher] Amazon EC2 M9g Instances
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Amazon EC2 M9g Instances
Author : AlexClickHouse
Score : 142 points
Date : 2025-12-06 05:36 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (aws.amazon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (aws.amazon.com)
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| So these are aarch64, right?
| watermelon0 wrote:
| Yes, Graviton chips are aarch64.
| adrian_b wrote:
| More specifically, the CPU cores in AWS Graviton5 are Neoverse
| V3 cores, which implement the Armv9.2-A ISA specification.
|
| Neoverse V3 is the server version of the Cortex-X4 core which
| has been used in a large number of smartphones.
|
| The Neoverse V3 and Cortex-X4 cores are very similar in size
| and performance with the Intel E-cores Skymont and Darkmont
| (the E-cores of Arrow Lake and of the future Panther Lake).
|
| Intel will launch next year a server CPU with Darkmont cores
| (Clearwater Forest), which will have cores similar to this AWS
| Graviton5, but for now Intel only has the Sierra Forest server
| CPUs with E-cores (belonging to the Xeon 6 series), which use
| much weaker CPU cores than those of the new Graviton5 (i.e.
| cores equivalent with the Crestmont E-cores of the old Meteor
| Lake).
|
| AMD Zen 5 CPUs are significantly better for computationally-
| intensive workloads, but for general-purpose applications
| without great computational demands the cores of Graviton5 and
| also Intel Skymont/Darkmont have greater performance per die
| area and power consumption, therefore lower cost.
| sahilagarwal wrote:
| Do you have any insight on when these will be generally
| available?
| adrian_b wrote:
| Amazon says "Sign up for the preview today".
|
| I have no connection with them, so I have no idea when
| these instances will be generally available.
|
| Privileged big customers appear to be already testing them.
| bushbaba wrote:
| Well, also no licensing costs to AMD/intel. So even if at
| slightly worse performance per chip it'll end up being
| cheaper still. AWS doesn't need to make money on their chips,
| as they already have the Ec2 margin.
| ksec wrote:
| >The Neoverse V3 and Cortex-X4 cores are very similar in size
| and performance with the Intel E-cores Skymont and Darkmont
| (the E-cores of Arrow Lake and of the future Panther Lake).
|
| That is not entirely accurate. X4 is big core design. All of
| its predecessor and successor has always had >1mm2 die space
| design. X4 is already on the smaller scale, it was the last
| ARM design before they went all in chasing Apple's A Series
| IPC. IRRC it was about 1.5mm2 depending on L2 cache. E-Core
| for Intel has always been below 1mm2. And again IRRC that die
| size has always been Intel's design guidelines and limits for
| E-Core design.
|
| More recent X5 / X925 and X6 / X930 / C1 Ultra?? ( I can no
| longer remember those names ) are double the size of X4. With
| X930 / C1 Ultra very close to A19 Pro Performance. Within
| ~5%.
|
| I assume they stick with X4 is simply because it offers best
| Performance / Die Space, but it is still a 2-3 years old
| design. On the other hand I am eagerly waiting for Zen 6c
| with 256 Core. I cant wait to see the Oxide team using Zen
| 6c, forget about the cloud. 90%+ of companies could fit their
| IT resources in a few racks.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Nope. Cortex-X4 is not a big core design, though you are
| right that at the time of its launch in 2023 the Arm
| company was not offering bigger cores yet.
|
| The cores designed now by the Arm company for non-embedded
| applications are distributed into 4 sizes, of which the
| smaller 2 sizes correspond to what were the original "big
| and little sizes", but what was originally the big size has
| been continued into what are now medium-to-small cores, and
| the last such core before the rebranding was Cortex-A725.
|
| Cortex-X4 is of the second size, medium-to-large.
| Cortex-X925 was the last big core design before Arm changed
| the branding this year, so several recent smartphones use
| Cortex-X925 as the big core, Cortex-X4 as the medium-sized
| core and Cortex-A725 as the small cores, omitting the
| smallest Cortex-A520 cores.
|
| Cortex-X4 and Intel Skymont have exactly the same size, 1.7
| square millimeter with 1 MB L2 cache memory (in Dimensity
| 9400 and Lunar Lake). This is about a third of the area of
| a big core like an Intel P-core and less than a half of the
| area of a Zen 5 compact core (but AMD uses an older less
| dense CMOS process; had AMD also used a "3 nm" process the
| area ratio would not have been so great, and Zen 5 has a
| double throughput for array operations).
|
| Moreover, Neoverse V3/Cortex-X4 and Intel Skymont/Darkmont
| have approximately the same number of execution units of
| each kind in their backends. Only their frontends are very
| different, which is caused by the different ISAs that must
| be decoded, Aarch64 vs. x86-64.
|
| The last Arm big core before rebranding, Cortex-X925, was
| totally unsuitable as a server core, as it had very poor
| performance per area, having a double area in comparison
| with Cortex-X4, but a performance greater by only a few
| tens percent at most. Therefore the performance per socket
| of a server CPU would have been much lower than that of a
| Graviton5, had it been implemented with Cortex-X925, due to
| the much lower number of cores per socket that could have
| been achieved.
|
| Cortex-X4 was launched in 2023 and it was the big core of
| the 2024 flagship smartphones, then it has become the
| medium core of the 2025 flagship smartphones. Its server
| variant, Neoverse V3, has been launched in 2024 and it has
| been deployed in products only this year, first by NVIDIA
| (in Orin) and now by AWS.
|
| It is not at all an obsolete core. As I have said, Intel
| will have only next year a server CPU with E-cores as good
| as Cortex-X4. We do not know yet any real numbers about the
| newly announced Arm cores that have replaced Cortex-A520,
| Cortex-A725, Cortex-X4 and Cortex-X925, so we do not know
| if they are really significantly better. The numbers used
| by Arm in presentations cannot be verified independently
| and usually when the performance is measured much later in
| actual products it does not match the optimistic
| predictions.
|
| The new generation of cores might be measurably better only
| for computational applications, because they now include
| matrix execution units, but their first implementation may
| be not optimal yet, as it happened in the past with the
| first implementation of SVE, when the new cores had worse
| energy efficiency than the previous generation (which was
| corrected by improved implementations later).
| dtf wrote:
| Good question! I read two different Amazon press releases on
| this but still had to come here for the answer. It seems
| strange they don't want to advertise the ISA of a compute
| product - does marketing think it might scare people away?
| fweimer wrote:
| It seems they don't document the ISA for any instance types.
| This could be deliberate (and unrelated to marketing) in case
| they decide to pull features from the instance types in a
| microcode update. Without any ISA specifics, previous
| customer commitments towards instance types would still
| apply.
| zokier wrote:
| They list what specific cpus you get for each instance
| type, see eg https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ec2/latest/instanc
| etypes/gp.html
| fweimer wrote:
| The part under "Performance specifications"? That's not
| really a commitment to functionality, especially since
| there is no vendor specification (ISA reference manual)
| for many of those model names given. Intel even published
| a FAQ about missing specifications: https://www.intel.com
| /content/www/us/en/support/articles/000...
| zokier wrote:
| At this point I think they just assume that everyone who
| cares already know that graviton=arm
| stevefan1999 wrote:
| If only dedicated game servers could run on aarch64...
|
| I've been experimenting FEX on Ampere A1 with x86 game servers
| but the performance is not that impressed
| Rohansi wrote:
| Doesn't help that Unity requires forking over a pile of cash
| just to build for Linux ARM ("Embedded Linux") and everything
| else is free.
| thewisenerd wrote:
| discussed a couple days ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46191993
|
| AWS introduces Graviton5-the company's most powerful and
| efficient CPU (14 comments)
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Pricing when? :(
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/
| StratusBen wrote:
| https://instances.vantage.sh/ recently added alerts for any
| pricing changes on EC2, including newly launching new
| instances. The site rebuilds every 4 hours so it usually breaks
| the pricing news first. I have it on for myself and its super
| helpful just to see when AWS changes things.
|
| [Disclaimer, I'm CEO of Vantage - the company that maintains
| the site]
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Are the built in AWS cost monitoring tools so bad that
| multiple businesses( including yours) exist just to monitor
| cost externally ?
|
| Or is your value proposition for companies that use a bunch
| of different cloud providers ?
| StratusBen wrote:
| [Not a sales pitch - just answering the questions]
|
| This AWS EC2 site is just an open-source project and site
| we maintain for the benefit of the community. So it's not
| directly our business but it promotes our brand and is just
| a helpful site that I think should exist. It's very popular
| and has been around for about 15 years now.
|
| Our main business hosted on the main domain of
| https://www.vantage.sh/ is around cloud cost management
| across 25 different providers (AWS, Azure, Datadog, OpenAI,
| Anthropic, etc) and the use-cases there about carving up
| one bill and showing specific costs back to engineers for
| them to be held accountable to, take action on, etc. Cloud
| costs and their impact on companies' margins is a big
| enough problem for vendors like us to exist and we're one
| player in a larger market.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| No shame in a sales pitch as long as it's transparent!
|
| I think I see the value here. In any large organization
| seeing where 100% of your cloud spending is going becomes
| a time consuming task unto itself.
| jolan wrote:
| FYI, it's been almost two years since us-east-1-chi-2
| launched and it's still missing on the site. Any reason for
| this? Kind of feels like local zones are a 2nd class citizen
| even at AWS itself.
|
| Thank you for maintaining this, I do use it every few months
| at $DAYJOB and it's quite useful for my capacity/deployment
| planning.
| yonisto wrote:
| Awhile back I was researching cloud instances for performance,
| And I noticed that AWS didn't have the latest generations of
| AMD/Intel. Which are far superior to Graviton 4.
|
| It seems obvious to me that AWS using their market dominance to
| shift workloads to Graviton.
| xeornet wrote:
| I think Graviton would still be much more energy efficient
| though? (I'm not sure)
|
| I believe the main motivator for AWS is efficiency, not
| performance. $ of income per watt spend is much better for them
| on Graviton.
| zokier wrote:
| At what point was that true? For example right now ec2 has
| granite rapids cpus available which are very much the latest
| and greatest from intel.
| jcims wrote:
| >Which are far superior to Graviton 4.
|
| Not if you are looking at price/performance. AWS could be
| taking a loss to elevate the product though, no way to know for
| sure.
| coredog64 wrote:
| If they were taking a loss, they wouldn't run a crapton of
| internal workloads on Graviton.
| bhouston wrote:
| This sort of makes sense. If there is no competitive advantage
| in buying the latest AMD or Intel CPUs, why buy them when you
| can just deploy a generic (ARM licensed) CPU at cheaper prices.
|
| The competitive advantage right now is in NVIDIA chips and I
| guess AWS needs all their free cash to buy those instead of
| non-competitive advantage CPUs.
| vel0city wrote:
| I imagine it can take time to actually validate and build out
| that new infrastructure at scale after AMD/Intel announces
| these products to the market. It wouldn't surprise me if
| hyperscalers like AWS, Google, Microsoft, et. al. get a little
| bit of early previews of this hardware, but it still takes time
| to negotiate sales, buy the chips, and then actually receive
| the new chips and make actually useful systems.
|
| Meanwhile, when AWS announces a new chip its probably something
| they have already been building out in their datacenters.
| Artoooooor wrote:
| General purpose not AI specific? I can't believe it.
| jackling wrote:
| AWS has plenty of AI specific offerings for EC2. The P, G and
| Trn families hit a wide range of AI use cases. Why wouldn't
| they also offer a general purpose one for typical compute?
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Plus with the AI boom, making sure that general purpose
| compute jobs aren't competing for valuable GPUs is very
| worthwhile...
| jackling wrote:
| Where do you see GPUs in this release? This is a CPU-based
| instance.
| jldugger wrote:
| Thats the point -- if you only ship GPU instances then
| every workload ties up precious GPU time.
| jackling wrote:
| Yea I misread the parent comment, my bad.
| arrowleaf wrote:
| You missed the touch of sarcasm. It's a joke, recent AWS
| announcements have been heavily AI-focused.
| jackling wrote:
| I don't really see how this is a productive comment for the
| article. Most of big tech focuses on AI and those typically
| get traction in the news. AWS specically has plenty of non-
| AI announcements: https://aws.amazon.com/new/
|
| Parent comment made a low quality joke that lacked
| substance.
| ciberado wrote:
| I think that is a joke that reflects pretty well the
| feeling of many people (me included) that miss the ten
| years ago AWS and their ability to amaze us with
| solutions for practical problems, instead of marketing
| claims on PowerPoints.
| jit_hacker wrote:
| Didn't M8g just come out? Am I crazy?
| jcims wrote:
| Not crazy. They just have a pretty rapid release cadence for
| Graviton. New chips ~ every two years.
| bhouston wrote:
| Is there a list of Geekbench performance metrics for the various
| Graviton CPUs?
|
| I need a reference point so I can compare it to Intel/AMD and
| Apple's ARM cpus.
|
| Otherwise it is buzzwords and superlatives. I need numbers so I
| can understand.
| sciurus wrote:
| https://instances.vantage.sh/ shows coremark scores for each
| EC2 instance type.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It always strikes me that the best place of information for a
| cloud provider is not from that provider but a third party
| website. This is not a good comment for the cloud provider.
| coredog64 wrote:
| Funny story: When I was at AWS, I found that the easiest
| way automate instance data collection was by using the
| Vantage website code (it's on GitHub).
|
| The cobbler's children have no shoes.
| StratusBen wrote:
| Founder of Vantage here and former AWS employee.
|
| We actually recently made the decision to staff someone
| full time on the site just to maintain it for the
| community. Even the JSON file for the site gets hit
| hundreds of thousands of times per day...feels like it's
| become kind of the de-facto source of truth in the
| community for where to get reliable AWS pricing
| information and I believe its powering a pretty
| remarkable amount of downstream applications with how
| much usage its getting.
|
| We acquired the site almost 5 years ago and want to
| continue to improve it for the community. If you have any
| cloud cost management needs, we're also able to help for
| our main business here: https://www.vantage.sh/
|
| Awesome to see all the comments on it here!
| LtdJorge wrote:
| Thry have to adhere to their marketing words and numbers
| like "efficiency increase of 99999% in performance per
| dollar per token per watt per U-235 atom used"
| winrid wrote:
| Also, use the ffmpeg fps column to check single threaded
| score.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| While the 5 variant isn't yet available outside of the preview,
| you can of course spin a 4 up and run geekbench yourself.
| Plenty of people have and you can find them in the GB DB. And
| of course most people spin up their specific workload to see
| how it compares.
|
| Core per core it pales compared to Apple's superlative
| processors, and falls behind AMD as well.
|
| But...that doesn't matter. You buy cloud resources generally
| for $/perf, and the Graviton's are far and away ahead on that
| metric.
| winrid wrote:
| Not true at all. Single thread CPU scores for Graviton2 are
| about half that of Intel, while only being about 20% cheaper
| at best.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| Groan. Yes, absolutely true.
|
| While I know this thread will turn into some noisy whack-a-
| mole bit of nonsense, an easy comparison is the c8g.2xlarge
| vs the c8i.2xlarge. The former is Graviton 4 vs Granite
| Rapids in the latter. Otherwise both 16GB, 15Gbps
| networking, and both are compute optimized, 8 vCPU
| machines.
|
| Performance is very similar. Indeed, since you herald the
| ffmpeg result elsewhere the Graviton machine beats the
| Intel device by 16%.
|
| And the Graviton is 17% _cheaper_.
|
| Like, this is a ridiculous canard to even go down. Over
| half of AWS' new machines are Graviton based, but per your
| rhetoric they're actually uncompetitive. So I guess no one
| is using them? Wow, silly Amazon.
| electroly wrote:
| The latter is a 4-core machine with 8 HyperThreads. This
| doesn't actually matter to your price-performance metric
| but is worth mentioning because it's the reason why the
| Intel part performs so comparatively poorly. They're fast
| chips, they're just wildly uneconomical. If you wanted to
| compare equal core counts (c8i.4xlarge vs. c8g.2xlarge),
| then the Intel instance type wins on performance but the
| Graviton is _58%_ cheaper.
| winrid wrote:
| Groan. Absolutely not. :)
|
| c8g passmark score: 1853 c8i passmark score: 3008
|
| I guess the fps column isn't a good representation of
| single thread score. Also looking at the passmark scores
| for i4i vs i4g, i4g is about 1k and intel is about 2k,
| and the more modern Graviton equivalent of i4 is the same
| price, so...
|
| https://go.runs-on.com/instances/ec2/c8g
|
| https://go.runs-on.com/instances/ec2/c8i
|
| https://go.runs-on.com/instances/ec2/i4g
|
| https://go.runs-on.com/instances/ec2/i4i
|
| Silly amazon.
| llm_nerd wrote:
| So confident. And exactly the whack-a-mole nonsense I
| predicted.
|
| See the comment by electroly. They actually know what
| they're talking about.
|
| See, the FPS score is for the whole machine. The c8g
| gives you 8 real cores. The C8i gives you 4 real cores, 4
| hyperthreading pseudo-cores. So for those two machines
| the c8g _unequivocally_ gives you more absolute computing
| performance, regardless of the passmark single thread (on
| a single core) on the c8i being better than a single core
| on the c8g. And the c8g comes at a big discount as well.
|
| That's...the point. The Graviton processors are cheaper
| per core, and lower performance per core, and you make it
| up in bulk. You get more performance per $ if you're okay
| with the ARM stack and your software is good with it, and
| this is basically universally true comparing Graviton
| instances versus Intel/AMD alternatives.
|
| You're wrong. Maybe cite some other random nonsense now?
| wmf wrote:
| Do you realize we're talking about Graviton5 now?
| winrid wrote:
| The Graviton5 instances I've been comparing to intel are
| the same price...
| llm_nerd wrote:
| In Amazon's Graviton 5 PR they note that over half of all new
| compute capacity added to AWS over the past three years has been
| Graviton-based. That's an amazing stat.
|
| It really is incredible how ARM basically commoditized processors
| (in a good way).
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| Inversely, I think it's siloed things in somewhat unhealthy
| ways. We now have a number of vendors that sell/rent you
| machines that are not generally purchasable. I don't think
| we've seen too many negative consequences yet, but if things
| continue in this direction then choosing a cloud provider for a
| high performance application (eg, something you'll want to
| compile to machine code and is therefore architecture specific
| in some way as opposed to a python flask app or something), one
| may have to make decisions that lock one into a particular
| cloud vendor. Or at least, it will further increase the cost of
| changing vendors if you have to significantly tweak your
| application for some oddities between diff arm implementations
| at different hosting providers, etc.
|
| I would much rather see some kind of mandatory open market sale
| of all cpu lines so that in theory you can run graviton procs
| in rackspace, apple m5 servers in azure, etc.
| sgerenser wrote:
| Graviton CPUs are just Neoverse cores (V3 in this case).
| While it's true that you can't just buy a box with the same
| cores, the cores are basically the same as what you'll get on
| a Google or Azure cloud instance (eventually... the latter
| two have yet to make available anything with Neoverse V3
| yet).
| jsheard wrote:
| Strangely the first-generation Graviton chips have actually
| shown up in MikroTik hardware that you can just buy. Amazon
| must be selling off their stock to third parties once it's
| phased out of use at AWS, but I doubt they'll ever sell the
| stuff they're still using.
| aseipp wrote:
| MikroTik is one of the few public organizations who can
| still get chips from Annapurna Labs after their
| acquisition by AWS, it seems. Many of their offerings are
| still using Annapurna parts, and Annapurna still appears
| as a distinct brand in AWS marketing for its custom
| silicon, even. I wonder what the specifics of that
| relationship are.
|
| (Side note but the original Graviton1 was just 16x
| Cortex-A72 cores, nothing particularly special about it.
| Actually, all of the Graviton series are just standard
| ARM cores. But beyond that the SKU they use is indeed the
| same one AWS uses.)
| re-thc wrote:
| > over half of all new compute capacity added to AWS over the
| past three years has been Graviton-based. That's an amazing
| stat.
|
| Yes and maybe no. They do "cheat" in that internal / managed
| services often use Graviton where possible. It works out
| cheaper without the Intel / AMD "tax".
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >Best price performance
|
| Don't they still offer free nano EC2s? This is not a better price
| than $0.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| The free tier for EC2 expires after a year, and the eligible
| t-family instances have low resources and extreme CPU
| throttling if you try to do anything more serious with them.
| diath wrote:
| No benchmarks. No FLOPs. No comparison to commodity hardware. I
| hate the cloud servers. "9 is faster than 8 which is faster than
| 7 which is faster than 6, ..., which is faster than 1, which has
| unknown performance".
| oofbey wrote:
| As soon as they're publicly usable people benchmark them
| carefully. All currently available models have clear metrics.
| mmontagna9 wrote:
| If you're interested in using them you should just bench them
| yourself.
| itomato wrote:
| You need to benchmark a new EC2 instance anyway. If it's out of
| spec, burn it down and redeploy.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Why is that needed, and how would you know if it's out of
| spec?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Who exactly believes manufacturer benchmarks? Just go run your
| benchmarks yourself and pick. Price/performance is a workload
| thing.
| sebazzz wrote:
| Since it will be a virtual machine, its performance can be
| arbitrarily reduced.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Happy DEC-10 day, for those who celebrate!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Xz-xq-d4jKk
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