Over the past two years, half of the instances created on AWS used Amazon’s custom Silicon Graviton built on Arm technology instead of x86 processors. Additionally, the Graviton processor was found to effectively handle demand by running more than 250,000 CPUs during Amazon Prime Day. This was mentioned in a presentation by Dave Brown, Vice President of AWS Compute and Networking Services, at the recent AWS re:Invent conference.
In other words, even if Graviton isn’t sold outside of Amazon, AWS is getting a significant return on this investment. AWS’s announcement shows, more than anything, that large cloud service providers are increasingly developing their own custom silicon.
“You always have to ask yourself how much your customers are using and whether they are simply testing it out,” said Patrick Moorhead, CEO of Moor Insights & Strategies. “But I think the announcement that 50% of the new capacity over the last few years has been in-house custom CPUs is a strong signal that it is possible at scale.”
According to Moorhead, AWS claims that almost all of its customers are using Graviton to some degree. “It means it’s spread out across the customer spectrum rather than being focused on a specific group,” Moorhead said, referring to Brown’s keynote. In other words, it shows that it is a trend rather than a one-time event,” he explained.
The biggest advantage of Graviton is cost savings. Graviton instances cost up to 20% less and consume up to 60% less energy than x86-based EC2 instances. Up to 40% more cost-effective than x86.
Graviton’s success could also have implications for Ampere, which makes Arm-based processors for the enterprise and cloud markets. Ampere suffers from the fact that major cloud service providers such as AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Meta are making their own custom chips instead of third-party processors.
However, legacy code acts as a major barrier to introducing Arm-based technology into enterprise data centers. This is because many self-developed and packaged applications are written based on x86 processors and cannot be used on Arm. Therefore, some companies may want to maintain an x86 infrastructure.
Graviton has gone through four generations since its first launch in 2018, showing a fairly rapid pace of development for a company with no silicon design experience. In July 2024, AWS announced the 4th generation Graviton CPU, emphasizing energy efficiency and high performance optimized for cloud workloads. Graviton 4 provides 30% higher computing performance, 50% more cores, and 75% more memory bandwidth than the 3rd generation. The new Graviton 4 instance, R8g, supports up to 8GB of memory per virtual processor and up to 192 processors.
Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and NVIDIA were able to quickly bring their respective enterprise projects to market thanks to Arm CSS, Arm’s custom computing subsystem. Arm CSS supports partners by providing additional subsystems such as memory and interconnect. Cloud service providers are creating differences from their competitors by differentiating themselves in networking and security protocols on top of basic design.
dl-itworldkorea@foundryco.com
Source: www.itworld.co.kr
