Amazon Unleashes Graviton4 Processor Power
In context: Amazon’s AWS Graviton line of Arm-based server CPUs is designed by subsidiary Annapurna Labs. It introduced the processors in 2018 for the Elastic Compute Cloud. These custom silicon chips, featuring 64-bit Neoverse cores, power AWS’s A1 instances tailored for Arm workloads like web services, caching, and microservices.
Amazon Web Services has introduced the powerful Graviton4 processor exclusively for AWS’s cloud servers. Despite being exclusive to AWS, the folks at Phoronix managed to get their hands on a unit to showcase its performance potential.
Graviton4 boasts 96 Arm Neoverse V2 cores, each with 2MB of L2 cache, along with 12 channels of DDR5-5600 RAM for exceptional memory bandwidth. Positioned as R8g instances, AWS promises up to triple the vCPUs and RAM compared to the previous R7g instances based on Graviton3. The company also claims significant improvements in performance for web apps, databases, and Java software.
The real standout performance of Graviton4 was revealed in benchmarks conducted by the publication on Ubuntu 24.04. In heavily parallelized HPC workloads like miniFE and Xcompact3d, Graviton4 outperformed not only its predecessors but also AMD’s EPYC ‘Genoa’ chips.
One impressive showing was in the ACES DGEMM HPC benchmark, where the 96-core Graviton4 metal instance scored 71,131 points, surpassing the second-place 96-core AMD EPYC 9684X at 53,167 points.
In code compilation, Graviton4 excelled against the Ampere Altra Max 128-core flagship and even surpassed the EPYC 9754 in the Timed LLVM Compilation test.
Graviton4 impressed in various workloads not commonly associated with Arm chips, such as 7-Zip compression and cryptography algorithms like ChaCha20.
After testing multiple workloads, Phoronix concluded that Graviton4 is the fastest Arm server processor to date, challenging current Intel and AMD chips across a range of tasks.
This silicon arms race will continue to intensify with upcoming chips like Intel’s Granite Rapids and AMD’s Turin. For now, AWS can boast a performance monster with Graviton4.
Image credit: Phoronix
