Amazon Web Services Inc. says its homegrown Arm-based Graviton2 instances are now ready for prime time.

The public cloud services giant Monday announced general availability of its sixth-generation Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud General Purpose instances. The instances are called M6g and they run on the company’s new Graviton2 processor, which is a purpose-built chip designed by AWS and its Annapurna Labs Ltd. research unit that’s based on Arm Ltd. designs.

The Graviton2 instances were first announced at AWS re:Invent 2019 in December amid much fanfare. Analysts will be watching demand for the new instances with keen interest, since Amazon claims they can deliver a superior performance compared to Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.-based instances for several kinds of workloads.

Built using a seven-nanometer manufacturing process, the Graviton2 instances are said to deliver up to seven times the performance of Amazon’s previous Graviton-powered A1 instances, with twice the floating-point performance, more memory channels and up to five times faster memory access. It’s more secure as well, with memory protected by 256-bit encryption. The instances are enabled by Amazon’s Nitro virtualization layer that abstracts away the underlying hardware.

AWS said the chips will power its M6g, C6g and R6g instances, which are versions of EC2 that are fine-tuned for different kinds of workloads. When Graviton2 was announced, the company claimed users will see up to 40% better price/performance than they do currently. Users have a choice of up to 64 virtual CPUs, 512 gigabytes of memory and 25 gigabits per second of networking.

The company said the chips are best suited for workloads such as application servers, gaming servers, midsized databases and caching fleets.

The Graviton2 chips are still no match for some of Intel’s and AMD’s most powerful processors, but the advantage is that they’re as much as 45% cheaper to produce and known for their minimal power consumption.

“AWS is dead serious with this new chip, and I don’t say that lightly,” Patrick Moorhead, an analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, said when they were first announced. “Whatever the outcome, we now have even more competition in the data center processor market.”

The Graviton2 instances have been used in preview by several big name customers, including Netflix Inc., Redbox Automated Retail LLC and Hotelbeds Group, S.L.U. They’re now generally available in several AWS regions, including US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland), Europe (Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Tokyo).

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