AWS Graviton

AWS Graviton is a family of 64-bit ARM-based CPUs designed by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) subsidiary Annapurna Labs. The processor family is distinguished by its lower energy use relative to x86-64, static clock rates, and omission of simultaneous multithreading. It was designed to be tightly integrated with AWS servers and datacenters, and is not sold outside Amazon.^[1]

In 2018, AWS released the first version of Graviton suitable for open-source and non-performance-critical scripting workloads as part of its A1 instance family.^[2] The second generation, AWS Graviton2, was announced in December 2019 as the first of its sixth generation instances, with AWS promising 40% improved price/performance over fifth generation Intel and AMD instances^[3] and an average of 72% reduction in power consumption.^[4] In May 2022, AWS made available Graviton3 processors as part of its seventh generation EC2 instances, offering a further 25% better compute performance over Graviton2.^[5]

The first Annapurna Labs silicon product launched under the AWS umbrella was the AWS Nitro hardware and supporting hypervisor in November 2017.^[6] Following on from Nitro, Annapurna began to develop general-purpose CPUs using its expertise.

The benefits AWS anticipated included:

• Offering more choice in terms of selection of EC2 instances for customers
• Targeting Arm-based applications
• Providing high availability and security, while reducing virtualization costs
• Offering decent server performance with lower prices for customers

The first Graviton processor reached these goals. Graviton2 now offers better performance compared to X86-64: 35% faster running Redis,^[7] 30% faster running Apache Cassandra,^[8] and up to 117% higher throughput for MongoDB.^[9] In addition to higher performance, Graviton offers 70% lower power consumption ^[10] and 20% lower price.^[11]

The first Graviton CPU has 16 Cortex A72 cores, with ARMv8-A ISA including Neon, crc, crypto. The vCPUs are physical cores in a single NUMA domain, running at 2.3 GHz. It also includes hardware acceleration for floating-point math, SIMD, plus AES, SHA-1, SHA-256, GCM, and CRC-32 algorithms.^[12]

Only the A1 EC2 instance contains the first version of Graviton.^[13]

The Graviton2 CPU has 64 Neoverse N1 cores, with ARMv8.2-A ISA including 2×128 bit Neon, LSE, fp16, rcpc, dotprod, crypto. The vCPUs are physical cores in a single NUMA domain, running at 2.5 GHz.^[14]

EC2 instances with Graviton2 CPU: M6g, M6gd, C6g, C6gd, C6gn, R6g, R6gd, T4g, X2gd, G5g, Im4gn, Is4gen, I4g.^[15] One or more of these instances are available in 28 AWS regions.

The Graviton3 CPU has 64 Neoverse V1 cores, with ARMv8.4-A ISA including 4×128 bit Neon, 2×256 bit SVE, LSE, rng, bf16, int8, crypto. Organized in a single NUMA domain, all vCPUs are physical cores running at 2.6 GHz.^[14] Graviton3 has 8 DDR5-4800 memory channels.

Copared to Graviton2, Graviton3 provides up to 25% better compute performance, up to 2× higher floating-point performance, up to 2× faster cryptographic workload performance, up to 3× better performance for machine learning workloads including support for bfloat16, and 50% more memory bandwidth. Graviton3-based instances use up to 60% less energy for the same performance than comparable EC2 instances.^[16]

Graviton3E is a higher power version of Graviton3.^[17]

EC2 instances with Graviton3 CPU: C7g, M7g, R7g; with local disk: C7gd, M7gd, R7gd.

EC2 instances with Graviton3E CPU: C7gn, HPC7g.

The Graviton4 CPU has 96 Neoverse V2 cores, with ARMv9.0-A ISA.^[18] It has 2 MB of L2 cache per core (192 MB total), and 12 DDR5-5600 memory channels. Graviton4 supports Arm's Branch Target Identification (BTI).

Amazon claims that Graviton4 is up to 40% faster for databases, 30% faster for web applications, and 45% faster for large Java applications than the Graviton3.

EC2 instances with Graviton4 CPU: R8g,^[19] X8g,^[20] C8g,^[21] M8g.^[22]

• Annapurna Labs, the chip-design subsidiary of the AWS organization.
• Timeline of Amazon Web Services for launch dates.
• Fujitsu Fugaku, a supercomputer using the A64FX CPU implementing ARMv8.2-A.
• Ampere Altra, a 64-bit ARM datacenter processor family implementing ARMv8.2-A deployed on Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud.

• Official website
• AWS: AWS Graviton Technical Guide
• Dev.to: Large System Extensions for AWS Graviton Processors
• Arm: Gain up to 35% performance benefits for deploying Redis on AWS Graviton2
• Arm: Gain up to 30% Cost-Performance benefits for Apache Kafka on AWS Graviton2 Processors
• AWS: AWS Lambda Functions Powered by AWS Graviton2 Processor – Run Your Functions on Arm and Get Up to 34% Better Price Performance
• AWS: Announcing AWS Graviton2 Support for AWS Fargate – Get up to 40% Better Price-Performance for Your Serverless Containers