Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced the general availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud C7g instances, the company’s next generation of compute-optimized instances powered by Amazon’s Graviton3 processors.

Designed for compute-intensive workloads such as analytics tools and scientific modeling software, the C7g instances deliver a 25% better compute performance for compute-intensive applications than current-generation C6g instances powered by AWS Graviton2 processors. The higher performance of the instances is said to make it possible for customers to run a wide range of compute-intensive workloads more efficiently.

The AWS EC2 C7g instances were announced in November, along with the introduction of the Amazon EX2 Trn1 instance for training artificial intelligence models. The Amazon-designed Graviton3 processors are the third generation of AWS custom chips.

Graviton3 delivers as much as double the performance of the previous generation Graviton2 CPUs with enhanced cryptographic task delivery. The chip also offers a feature called “pointer authentication” to reduce the risk of cyberattacks, the technology being able to detect malicious attempts to overwrite memory and block them.

The new C7g instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, AWS-designed hardware and software that streamline the delivery of isolated multitenancy, private networking and fast local storage. The AWS Nitro System offloads the CPU virtualization, storage and networking functions to dedicated hardware and software, delivering a performance level that is claimed to be nearly indistinguishable from that of bare-metal servers.

The new release will be popular with AWS’s biggest customers, with 48 of the top 50 EC2 customers currently using AWS Graviton2-based instances. Notable customers include DirecTV LLC, Warner Bros. Discovery Inc., Epic Games Inc., Formula 1, Honeycomb.io, Intuit Inc., Lyft Inc., Nielsen Holdings Inc., Snap Inc. and Splunk Inc.

“Customers of all sizes are seeing significant performance gains and cost savings using AWS Graviton-based instances,” David Brown, vice president of Amazon EC2 at AWS, said in a statement. “Since we own the end-to-end chip development process, we’re able to innovate and deliver new instances to customers faster.”

C7g instances are available for purchase as On-Demand Instances, with Savings Plans, Reserved Instances, or Spot Instances. C7g instances are available today in US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon), with availability in additional AWS Regions coming later this year.

In December, Brown spoke with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, about the technology involved and its advantages. He noted at the time AWS EC2 houses more than 475 instances and was eyeing 500 instances by the end of the year.

Image: AWS