UPDATED: Mea culpa. Due to an error in calculating the performance of the Graviton 4, we wrongly asserted that the price/performance of these chips wa

AWS Pushes Bang For The Buck With Graviton 4 Instances

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2024-07-11 15:00:06

UPDATED: Mea culpa. Due to an error in calculating the performance of the Graviton 4, we wrongly asserted that the price/performance of these chips was worse than, not better than, than the Graviton 3. Below is a corrected story and set of data.

The decades of Moore’s Law improvements in server CPU performance and economics have trained us all to think that no matter what, we will always see a lower cost per unit of performance with each successive generation of processors. And this is getting harder and harder to do. But with the Graviton 4 chip Arm server chip, Amazon Web Services is still getting it done.

The Graviton 4 processors designed by AWS, for which the initial R8g instances are generally available today, continue to push the envelope on performance and price/performance. Eventually there will be more instances launched on AWS based on Graviton 4, with variations in memory, local storage, and I/O capacity, but for now the base R8g instances are only available in four regions.

The Graviton family of Arm-based CPUs, which were designed by the Annapurna Labs division of the cloud juggernaut, have been gradually embiggening and are able to take on much bigger jobs with the Graviton 4 generation. The chip has faster cores, better cores, more cores, and for the first time sports two-socket NUMA memory clustering to bring 192 cores running at 2.8 GHz and backed up by 1.5 TB of main memory. The original Graviton 1 chip from November 2018 looks like a toy compared to the Graviton 4 that is rentable today.