The R3 instance family, generally available since April 2014, is a memory-optimized generation featuring Intel Xeon E5-2670 v2 "Ivy Bridge" processors clocked at 2.5 GHz. These instances utilize SSD-backed instance storage and support Enhanced Networking, which provides lower latency and higher packet-per-second performance. The largest r3.8xlarge instance offers 10 Gigabit networking and up to 244 GiB of memory across its two SSD volumes. R3 instances are best suited for memory-intensive workloads like in-memory analytics and high-performance databases.