Recently we announced the availability of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) R8a instances, the latest addition to the AMD memory-optimized instance family. These instances are powered by the 5th Generation AMD EPYC (codename Turin) processors with a maximum frequency of 4.5 GHz. In this post I take these instances for a spin and benchmark MySQL later on, but first I discuss the top things you should know about these instances.