Amazon has publicly launched the first compute instances using its new Graviton4 chip.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week announced its Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) R8g instances powered by Graviton4 processors is generally available.
The Graviton4 is AWS' most powerful and energy-efficient processor, and according to AWS the new instances deliver a 30 percent better performance compared to AWS Graviton3-based instances.
The instances have been available in preview since November 2023, and are designed for memory-intensive workloads such as databases, in-memory caches, and real-time big data analytics.
The AWS Graviton4 uses a 64-bit Arm instruction set architecture and has 73 billion transistors. Graviton chips were first launched in 2018 with the Graviton1. The latest iteration offers four times the performance of the original Graviton chip.
The chip is based on the Demeter V2 core from Arm, the same core that Nvidia is using for its 72-core Grace CPU.
Rahul Kulkarni, director of EC2 product management for AWS told SiliconAngle: "With each passing generation, we have broadened the scope of applicable workloads that fit on Graviton. The first generation worked as a proof of concept for web applications, generation two increased in scope for scale-out workloads, and generation three built-in floating point and machine learning capabilities and high-performance computing.
“We have all of our top 100 customers running production workloads in Graviton, and we have over 50,000 customers running Graviton in a meaningful capacity,” added Kulkarni.
During the preview availability period, customers including Epic Games, SmugMug, Honeycomb, SAP, and ClickHouse tested their workloads on the R8g instances.
According to AWS, SmugMug saw a 20 to 30 percent performance improvement with the fourth generation versus the third generation.
The R8g instances come in larger sizes with up to three times more vCPUs, three times the memory, 75 percent more memory bandwidth, and up to a 50Gbps network bandwidth and 40Gbps EBS bandwidth. The instance can support up to eight gigabytes of memory per virtual processor.
The instances are available in a variety of twelve sizes from one vCPU to 192 vCPUs, and are built on the AWS Nitro System which offloads CPU virtualization, storage, and networking functions to dedicated hardware and software.
The Graviton4-based R8g instances are available in the US East (Northern Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt) AWS regions.
An analysis by The Next Platform, noted: "If you compare the top bin 64-core R7g to the top-bin 64-core R8g instance, the R8g instance provides 30 percent more performance, it costs 10 percent more, and has a price/performance that is 15.4 percent better."
