Amazon has made a significant mark with its Arm-based Graviton CPUs, indicating a strong trend among hyperscalers to develop their own custom silicon. In the past two years, 50% of the instances launched on Amazon Web Services (AWS) utilized Graviton rather than traditional x86 processors. During the recent Amazon Prime Day, the Graviton processor efficiently powered over 250,000 CPUs, showcasing its ability to meet high-demand scenarios, as highlighted by AWS vice president Dave Brown at the AWS reInvent conference.
Despite Graviton not being available for external purchase, AWS is reaping substantial benefits from its development. Patrick Moorhead, CEO of Moor Insights & Strategies, emphasized that the extensive use of Graviton by AWS suggests a robust trend among customers, rather than isolated cases. Most notably, Graviton instances are available at up to 20% lower costs and utilize 60% less energy compared to comparable EC2 instances on x86, presenting them as cost-effective alternatives.
Graviton’s success has set challenges for other companies like Ampere, which also produces Arm-based processors for enterprise use. As major cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Meta, increasingly invest in custom chips, the prospects for third-party processors appear increasingly uncertain. Moreover, legacy code and applications optimized for x86 might hinder the transition to Arm in enterprise data centers.
Since its initial release in 2018, Graviton has evolved through four generations, significantly accelerating its development pace, especially for a company previously devoid of silicon design experience. The launch of the fourth-generation Graviton CPU, Graviton4, brought remarkable improvements: a 30% boost in computing power, 50% more cores, and 75% increased memory bandwidth. The new R8g instances support up to 8GB of memory per virtual processor, up to a total of 192 processors.
This trend extends beyond Amazon, as major hyperscalers are rapidly advancing their Arm projects, aided by Arm’s custom compute subsystem, Arm CSS. This support enables them to enhance their designs and introduce unique networking and security features, further solidifying the trend of custom silicon within the cloud computing sector.
