The 25 percent performance number AWS is advertising for its new R9g instances isn’t really the story. What matters more is that AWS just made switching to its own Arm chips easier than switching away from them.
AWS made its memory-optimized EC2 R9g and R9gd instances generally available this week, bringing Graviton5 processors to database, caching, analytics, and container workloads. The headline figure, up to 25 percent higher compute performance per vCPU compared to Graviton4, undersells what’s actually changed. AWS boosted memory bandwidth, cache capacity, network throughput, and storage bandwidth simultaneously, addressing the reality that database and caching workloads usually spend more time waiting on data than crunching numbers.
The specs back that up. Graviton5 moves to DDR5 memory running at 8,800 MT/s, up sharply from Graviton4’s 5,600 MT/s, and L3 cache capacity grows fivefold. AWS also claims up to double the network and EBS bandwidth on its largest instance sizes, along with triple the packet-processing performance in some configurations. The biggest R9gd instances scale to 192 vCPUs and 1,536 GiB of memory, with up to 100 Gbps of network bandwidth.
R9gd variants add local NVMe SSD storage on top of that, useful for temporary databases, caching layers, and analytics scratch space where low latency matters more than long-term persistence. AWS is clear that this storage is ephemeral, though, so applications built on it still need replication or persistence handled elsewhere.
The migration story matters as much as the hardware. AWS says customers moving from R8g generally won’t need to touch their application code, and Arm64 container images move onto the new instances without modification. That’s a meaningful shift for organizations already inside the Graviton ecosystem. For companies still running x86 infrastructure, though, the calculation stays harder, proprietary software, legacy binaries, and licensing agreements don’t disappear just because the new chip performs better.
For now, R9g and R9gd are only available in AWS regions covering Northern Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, and Frankfurt, limiting how quickly multi-region workloads can actually standardize on them. The launch follows Graviton5-based general-purpose and compute-optimized instance families AWS rolled out earlier in 2026, adding another piece to a processor lineup AWS keeps expanding across its catalog.
