AWS Graviton4 (R8g) Now Available in Singapore and AP Regions — Free 30% Performance Upgrade Over Graviton3

What is AWS Graviton4?

AWS Graviton4 is Amazon's fourth-generation custom ARM processor, powering the R8g instance family. Graviton processors use the ARM64 instruction set — the same architecture used in modern smartphones and Apple Silicon — but optimised for cloud server workloads. The key advantage: ARM processors deliver more compute per watt and per dollar than equivalent x86 (Intel/AMD) chips, because they were designed for efficiency rather than backwards compatibility with decades-old instruction sets.

What Changed?

Graviton4 (R8g instances) expanded from initial US availability to all major regions including ap-southeast-1 (Singapore), ap-northeast-1 (Tokyo), ap-south-1 (Mumbai), and eu-west-1 (Ireland). Pricing is the same as equivalent R7g (Graviton3) instances: r8g.large (2 vCPU/16GB) at $0.1008/hr, r8g.2xlarge (8 vCPU/64GB) at $0.4032/hr, r8g.16xlarge (64 vCPU/512GB) at $3.2256/hr. Available in on-demand, 1-year and 3-year Reserved Instance pricing.

The Performance Improvement

AWS benchmark data shows Graviton4 delivers 30% better compute performance and 50% better ML inference throughput versus Graviton3 (R7g). The improvements come from: larger L3 cache (96MB vs 32MB on Graviton3), wider SIMD units for vector processing, improved branch prediction reducing instruction pipeline stalls, and DDR5 memory support providing 50% more memory bandwidth vs DDR4 on Graviton3. For Java workloads specifically (one of the most common server languages), Graviton4 JVM performance shows 40% improvement. For PostgreSQL database workloads, benchmarks show 35% more queries per second.

Cross-Cloud Context

At r8g.2xlarge (8 vCPU/64GB) pricing of $0.4032/hr in Singapore: R8g (Graviton4) = $295/month, Azure E8s v5 (Intel) = $504/month, GCP n2-highmem-8 = $561/month, OCI E5.Flex 4OCPU 64GB = $58/month. Graviton4 is 41% cheaper than Azure and 47% cheaper than GCP for equivalent memory-optimised configurations — while delivering competitive performance. OCI remains significantly cheaper but with different ecosystem trade-offs.

How to Migrate

Migration from R7g (Graviton3) to R8g (Graviton4) requires only changing the instance type — no application changes, no recompilation, no ARM-specific work. The ARM64 instruction set is the same across Graviton generations. In the AWS Console: EC2 → select instance → Instance state → Stop → Change instance type → select r8g equivalent → Start. For Auto Scaling Groups: update the launch template with the new instance type — the next scale-out event will use Graviton4. For RDS instances running on Graviton3, check the available R8g-equivalent DB instance types in your region.

Who Should Act Now

Any team running R6g or R7g instances in Singapore, Tokyo, or Mumbai should plan the migration to R8g within 30 days — it is a zero-cost 30% performance upgrade. For teams still on Intel M-series or C-series in Singapore: evaluate Graviton4 for any Linux-only workloads. Windows workloads cannot run on ARM. For containerised workloads, add the platform: linux/arm64 target to your Docker build pipeline first, then test in a staging environment before migrating production.