Amazon's latest Graviton 4 EC2 instances pack dual 300Gbps NICs

Amazon Web Services has cooked up a new Graviton 4-powered instance tuned for network-intensive applications like cloud firewalls and load balancers.

The C8gn instances revealed this week offer up to 192 Arm-based vCPUs across a pair of Graviton 4 processors and 384GB of DDR5 memory, which Amazon Web Services (AWS) says gives the system a 30 percent performance advantage over its Graviton 3E-based C7gn instances.

However, the offering's headline feature isn't core count or memory capacity, but rather the 600Gbps of network and 60Gbps of Elastic Block Store (EBS) bandwidth delivered by its twin Nitro 6 data processing units (DPUs).

AWS has pitched these instances at workloads that push and process packets, such as mostly aimed these instances at workloads like virtualized firewalls, routers, load balancers, proxy servers, and ...