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Community Blog Unleashing Next-Gen Performance: A Deep Dive into Alibaba Cloud’s 9th Generation ECS (g9i) Instances

Unleashing Next-Gen Performance: A Deep Dive into Alibaba Cloud’s 9th Generation ECS (g9i) Instances

A Deep Dive into Alibaba Cloud’s 9th Generation ECS (g9i) Instances.

The cloud computing landscape is evolving at a breakneck pace, demanding ever-greater performance, efficiency, and security from infrastructure. In response, Alibaba Cloud has unveiled its most powerful and feature-rich general-purpose compute platform in May 2025: the 9th Generation Enterprise Class Compute (g9i) instances, powered by the cutting-edge 6th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors. At the point of writing, customer adoption of the 9th Gen ECS is surging, with businesses rapidly embracing its next-generation capabilities.

ECS Gen 9 Intel isn't just an incremental upgrade; it's a fundamental leap forward, built on a revolutionary architecture and packed with hardware accelerators designed to tackle the toughest workloads — from AI inference and high-frequency trading to massive databases and confidential computing. Let’s explore what makes the g9i series a game-changer.

The Powerhouse Under the Hood: 6th Gen Intel Xeon & CIPU Architecture

At the core of the g9i series lies the 6th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processor, codenamed Granite Rapids. This new silicon delivers significant improvements over its predecessor:

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Higher Clock Speeds: An all-core turbo frequency of up to 3.6 GHz (and 3.8 GHz for the hfg9i), with a single-core max of 3.9 GHz.

Massive Cache Boost: The Last-Level Cache (LLC) has been increased by 50%, jumping from 320 MB to a colossal 504 MB. This dramatically reduces memory latency, a critical factor for database and AI workloads.

Faster Memory: Memory bandwidth has surged by 70%, thanks to a move from 8-channel DDR5 5600 MT/s to 12-channel DDR5 6400 MT/s.

Enhanced Acceleration: Standard support for the AMX (Advanced Matrix Extensions) accelerator, now with added fp16 instruction support, making it ideal for AI/ML tasks. It also includes QAT (QuickAssist Technology) for hardware-accelerated encryption, decryption, and compression.

But the true magic happens when this powerful CPU meets Alibaba Cloud’s purpose built Cloud Infrastructure Processing Unit (CIPU) 2.0 architecture. The CIPU acts as the central nervous system of the cloud, offloading virtualization, storage, and networking tasks from the CPU. This results in:

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Near Zero Computing Power Loss: Hardware acceleration ensures that the full power of the CPU is available for your applications.

Ultra-High E2E Performance: Delivering superior general-purpose computing performance compared to similar products in the market.

Unified Resource Pooling: Apsara OS orchestrates physical resources (CPU, GPU, Storage, Network) managed by the CIPU, creating a highly elastic and versatile cloud resource pool.

Game-Changing Features: Beyond Raw Power

The g9i series isn't just about faster CPUs; it introduces several groundbreaking features:

  • Standard eRDMA Networking

Forget complex network configurations. The g9i comes with elastic Remote Direct Memory Access (eRDMA) enabled out-of-the-box. This provides:

  1. Ultra-Low Latency: As low as 8 microseconds.
  2. High Throughput: Up to 40 million packets per second.
  3. Massive Performance Gains: Benchmarks show over 50% performance boost for Redis and over 300% improvement for HPC workloads compared to traditional VPC networks. It’s plug-and-play, requiring no application changes.

Intel TDX Confidential Computing

  1. Security is paramount. Intel TDX provides hardware-based isolation for virtual machines, ensuring data confidentiality even if the host OS is compromised.
  2. No Application Changes: Run existing applications without modification.
  3. Strong Protection: Prevents side-channel attacks and protects sensitive data in use.
    Minimal Overhead: Business applications run with virtually no performance degradation.

Elastic Ephemeral Disks (EED)

For cost-effective, high-performance temporary storage, EEDs are a perfect fit.

  1. Blazing Fast: Up to 1 million IOPS and 4 GB/s throughput per disk.
  2. Flexible & Cost-Efficient: Scale storage up or down with your business, reducing waste. Offers up to 30% cost savings in big data cache scenarios.
  3. Fast Recovery: Failures can be recovered in under an hour.

vISST for Mixed Workloads

For complex environments running both online (high-priority) and offline (low-priority) tasks, Intel Speed Select Technology (vISST) allows you to dynamically boost specific cores.

  1. Designate cores to run at higher frequencies (e.g., 3.9 GHz) for critical workloads while others run at base frequency (2.6 GHz).
  2. Optimizes resource utilization and performance for mixed-use scenarios.

Real-World Impact: Accelerating Critical Workloads

The g9i’s enhancements translate directly into tangible business value:

AI & Machine Learning: AMX acceleration delivers massive gains. For example, ResNet50 inference sees a 2x performance boost over previous generations.

Encryption & Decryption: QAT provides native hardware encryption and decryption with 4x to 6x performance improvements.

Database Performance: MySQL and Redis see performance boosts of 20%+ compared to the 8th gen, and adding another 50% performance boost with eRDMA.

Recommendation Systems: The Wide & Deep Learning model shows up to 2.35x performance gain on g9i over older instances.

Security & Fraud Detection: Used by Ant Digital’s ZOLOZ system, the g9i’s AMX FP16 instructions improve facial recognition accuracy by 23%, helping combat deepfake threats.

The Bottom Line: The Future of Cloud Computing is Here

Alibaba Cloud’s 9th Generation ECS instances, particularly the g9i series, represent a significant milestone. By combining the latest Intel Xeon processors with the innovative CIPU architecture and a suite of advanced features like standard eRDMA, TDX, and AMX acceleration, they deliver unparalleled performance, security, and flexibility.

Whether you're running a massive online game, a high-frequency trading platform, a complex AI model, or a mission-critical database, the g9i series provides the stable, low-latency, and feature-rich foundation your business demands. It’s not just about being faster; it’s about enabling new possibilities and driving innovation in the cloud era.

Ready to experience the next generation? Explore the g9i instance families on Alibaba Cloud today.
https://www.alibabacloud.com/en/Product/ecs-intel-9th?_p_lc=1

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