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Pace of Innovation for Custom Silicon on Arm Continues with AWS Graviton4

AWS announces a new Arm Neoverse-based CPU, the AWS Graviton4.
By Dermot O'Driscoll, Vice President of Product Solutions, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm

It’s been said that the best way to predict the future is to create it. This anecdote is clearly reflected in the data center and infrastructure market we see today being built on Arm. Ten years ago, no one had heard of a data processing unit (DPU); and it was early days for the Arm CPU server market. But some insightful and innovative people at Amazon had the vision to see where compute was heading, and that vision led to investments and partnerships and to what we now know today as AWS Nitro – one of the first true DPUs – and AWS Graviton – the first CPU custom-built by a hyperscale cloud provider.

Both represented the future of purpose-built infrastructure for the era of AI and workload-optimized computing we see clearly emerging at scale today. Having worked closely with AWS for almost 10 years, it’s fantastic to see what they have brought to market. This collaboration between AWS and Arm is at the forefront of driving the transformational changes we are seeing in the datacenter.

Today, we celebrate another major milestone as AWS announces a new Neoverse-based CPU, the AWS Graviton4. This marks the fourth Graviton CPU in five years – an incredible pace of innovation, and proof of the advantages of building custom silicon on Arm. Graviton4 supports 50 percent more cores and up to 75 percent more memory bandwidth per CPU compared to its predecessor, AWS Graviton3. These capability upgrades result in some very impressive performance improvements – up to 30 percent faster for web applications, 40 percent for databases, and 45 percent for large Java applications.

According to AWS, Graviton4 is the most powerful and energy efficient chip they have ever built. Best of all? Across their entire fleet, Graviton4 delivers the best performance and energy efficiency for a broad range of workloads running on Amazon EC2.

AWS Graviton4 chip image

AWS also announced the first instance family using Graviton4, the Amazon EC2 R8g. EC2 R8g instances are ideal for memory-intensive workloads such as open-source databases and real-time big data analytics. With these instances, AWS is able to deliver the best price-performance for memory-intensive workloads. R8g instances are available in preview today, and customers can request access here.

We are very excited about this announcement and the foundational role Arm technology plays in helping AWS customers improve performance while reducing their monthly cloud computing costs and carbon footprint. Congratulations to AWS and the team at Annapurna Labs for continuing to push the pace of custom silicon innovation on Arm.

The announcement of AWS Graviton4 builds on what has been a monumental year for Arm Neoverse and our mission to drive a transformation in the world’s computing infrastructure. From Marvell unveiling their OCTEON 10 Fusion Processor family for 5G networks, to Ampere shipping their next-generation AmpereOne cloud-native CPU, to SiPearl “Rhea” being selected to power Europe’s first Exascale supercomputer, Arm helped drive choice and innovation across all infrastructure segments. The software ecosystem grew by leaps and bounds as well, with Snowflake, Databricks, SAP Hana, Oracle Database, and Stripe, to name a few, announcing Arm support. NVIDIA began shipping Grace CPU and Grace-Hopper Superchips for powering next-generation AI datacenters, and Microsoft announced their own Arm-powered custom silicon CPU, the Cobalt 100, based on Arm Neoverse CSS.

As exciting as 2023 has been, we’re even more excited about what is over the horizon for Arm and our partners. Computing infrastructure is firmly stepping into the AI era and data centers are being reimagined top-to-bottom and optimized for the ML-based workloads that will define the coming decades. The market leaders of this transition are choosing Arm Neoverse as their computing foundation for the performance, efficiency and unmatched flexibility we provide alongside an unparalleled software and silicon ecosystem – the future is being built, today, on Arm.

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