Cloud Mercato tested CPU performance using a range of encryption speed tests:
Cloud Mercato's tested the I/O performance of this instance using a 100GB General Purpose SSD. Below are the results:
I/O rate testing is conducted with local and block storages attached to the instance. Cloud Mercato uses the well-known open-source tool FIO. To express IOPS the following parametersare used: 4K block, random access, no filesystem (except for write access with root volume and avoidance of cache and buffer.
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GKE on AWS supports x86 instance types for control planes. For node pools, GKE on AWS supports both x86 and Arm instance types. For both control planes and node pools, GKE on AWS supports only Nitro-based instance types.

Just did a quick test. It booted up in about 11s vs around 19s for Xen. I did notice that it took a while for the status check to go green though. There was a warning message saying that it couldn't connect to the instance. I was able to SSH just fine though.