AWS Graviton Processor
Enabling the best price performance in Amazon EC2
AWS Graviton processors are custom-built by Amazon Web Services using 64-bit Arm Neoverse cores to deliver the best price performance for your cloud workloads running in Amazon EC2. Amazon EC2 provides the broadest and deepest portfolio of compute instances, including many that are powered by latest-generation Intel and AMD processors. AWS Graviton processors add even more choice to help customers optimize performance and cost for their workloads.
The first-generation AWS Graviton processors power Amazon EC2 A1 instances, the first ever Arm-based instances on AWS. These instances deliver significant cost savings over other general-purpose instances for scale-out applications such as web servers, containerized microservices, data/log processing, and other workloads that can run on smaller cores and fit within the available memory footprint.
AWS Graviton2 processors deliver a major leap in performance and capabilities over first-generation AWS Graviton processors. They power Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances that provide up to 40% better price performance over comparable current generation instances1 for a wide variety of workloads, including application servers, micro-services, high-performance computing, electronic design automation, gaming, open-source databases, and in-memory caches. The AWS Graviton2 processors also provide enhanced performance for video encoding workloads, hardware acceleration for compression workloads, and support for CPU-based machine learning inference. They deliver 7x performance, 4x the number of compute cores, 2x larger caches, and 5x faster memory compared to the first-generation Graviton processors.
Benefits
Best price performance for a broad spectrum of workloads
AWS Graviton2-based general-purpose (M6g), compute-optimized (C6g), and memory-optimized (R6g) EC2 instances deliver up to 40% better price performance over comparable current generation instances1 for a broad spectrum of workloads such as application servers, micro-services, video encoding, high-performance computing, electronic design automation, compression, gaming, open-source databases, in-memory caches, and CPU-based machine learning inference. M6g instances are now available in preview. These instances, along with C6g and R6g instances and M6gd, C6gd, and R6gd variants with local NVMe-based SSD storage will be generally available soon.
Extensive ecosystem support
AWS Graviton2 processors, based on the 64-bit Arm architecture, are supported by several popular Linux operating systems including Amazon Linux 2, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Ubuntu. Many popular applications and services from AWS and Independent Software Vendors also support AWS Graviton2-based instances, including Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, Amazon CodeBuild, Amazon CodeCommit, Amazon CodePipeline, Amazon CodeDeploy, Amazon CloudWatch, Docker Desktop and Enterprise Engine, Rancher k3s, NGINX, Datadog, CrowdStrike, and Jenkins. Arm developers can also leverage this ecosystem to build applications natively in the cloud, thereby eliminating the need for emulation and cross-compilation, which are error prone and time consuming.
Enhanced security for cloud applications
Developers building applications for the cloud rely on cloud infrastructure for security, speed and optimal resource footprint. AWS Graviton2 processors feature key capabilities that enables developers to run cloud native applications securely, and at scale, including always-on 256-bit DRAM encryption and 50% faster per core encryption performance compared to first-generation AWS Graviton. Graviton2 powered instances are built on the Nitro System that features the Nitro security chip with dedicated hardware and software for security functions, and support encrypted EBS storage volumes by default.
EC2 Instances Powered by AWS Graviton2
General Purpose
Best price performance for general purpose workloads with balanced compute, memory, and networking
Built for: General-purpose workloads such as application servers, mid-size data stores, microservices, and cluster computing.
Compute Optimized
Best price performance for compute-intensive workloads
Built for: Compute intensive applications such as high performance computing, video encoding, gaming, and CPU-based machine learning inference acceleration.
Coming Soon
Memory Optimized
Best price performance for workloads that process large data sets in memory
Built for: Memory intensive workloads such as open-source databases (MySQL, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL), or in-memory caches (Redis, Memcached).
Coming Soon
EC2 Instances Powered by First Generation AWS Graviton
Amazon EC2 A1 Instances, powered by first-generation AWS Graviton processors, deliver significant cost savings over other general-purpose instances scale-out applications such as web servers, containerized microservices, data/log processing, and other workloads that can run on smaller cores and fit within the available memory footprint. These instances will also appeal to developers, enthusiasts, and educators across the Arm community.
Software and Services
Operating Systems
Container Services
Developer Tools and Software
Agents
And many others...
Resources
1 20% lower cost and up to 40% higher performance over Amazon EC2 M5 instances, based on internal testing of workloads.