Announcing Preview for Amazon RDS M6g and R6g Instance Types, Powered by AWS Graviton2 Processors

Posted on: Jul 31, 2020

Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) now supports AWS Graviton2-based database instances in preview. Graviton2 M6g and R6g database instances deliver better price performance over comparable current generation x86-based database instances. You can launch these database instances when using Amazon RDS for MySQL and Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL. Support for Amazon Aurora and Amazon RDS for MariaDB is coming soon.

AWS announced the general availability of Amazon EC2 instances using the latest generation of Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors on June 11, 2020. AWS Graviton processors are custom built by Amazon Web Services using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores and deliver several performance optimizations over first-generation AWS Graviton processors. This includes 7x the performance, 4x the number of compute cores, 2x larger private caches per core, 5x faster memory, and 2x faster floating-point performance per core. Additionally, the AWS Graviton2 processors feature always-on fully encrypted DDR4 memory and 50% faster per core encryption performance. These performance improvements make the Graviton2 M6g and R6g database instances a great choice for database workloads.

You can launch new instances in the Amazon RDS Management Console or using the AWS CLI. Upgrading a database instance to Graviton2 requires a simple instance type modification, using the same steps as any other instance modification. Graviton2 is supported on RDS MySQL 8.0.17 or higher and RDS PostgreSQL 12.3 and higher. For more details, refer to the documentation.

The M6g and R6g database instances are now available for Amazon RDS in preview in the AWS US East (N. Virginia and Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt and Ireland), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions.

For complete information on pricing and regional availability, please refer to the Amazon RDS pricing page. Review our technical documentation for more details.