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AWS puts latest homebrew Graviton3 Arm processor in production

Just one instance type for now, cheaper than third-gen Xeons and Epycs

Amazon Web Services has made its latest homebrew processor, the Graviton3, available to rent in its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) infrastructure-as-a-service offering.

The cloud colossus unveiled Graviton3 at its late-2021 re:Invent conference, revealing that the 55-billion-transistor device includes 64 Arm-compatible CPU cores, runs at a 2.6GHz clock speed, can address DDR5 RAM with 300GB/sec max memory bandwidth, and employs Arm's 256-bit Scalable Vector Extensions.

The chips were offered as a tech preview to select customers. And on Monday, AWS made them available to all-comers in a single instance type named C7g.

EC2's C-series instances are billed as ideal for compute-intensive tasks. The series is now in its seventh generation – and the only seventh-gen instance uses Graviton3. Intel Xeons and AMD Epycs are currently confined to sixth-gen instance types.

Take that, you x86 dinosaurs.

The C7g instances offer eight sizes, with 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 48, and 64 vCPUs.

The Register has looked up hourly prices for the C7 instance, the C6 instance that uses the Graviton2, and the C-series instances running the third-gen Xeon and Epyc processors. We used the US West (Oregon) region as our guide, as it is one of just two regions currently offering the Graviton3. Our research considered instances running the same number of vCPUs offered by the C7 instance type.

As the table below shows, Graviton3 instances cost more than Graviton2-powered rent-a-servers, but less than their x86 competitors. AWS offers other ways to consume its infrastructure at lower prices.

vCPUs C7g Graviton3 C6i 3rd-gen Xeon C6a 3rd-gen Epyc C6g Graviton2
1 $0.036 N/A N/A $0.034
2 $0.073 $0.085 $0.077 $0.068
4 $0.145 $0.170 $0.153 $0.136
8 $0.290 $0.340 $0.306 $0.272
16 $0.580 $0.680 $0.612 $0.544
32 $1.160 $1.360 $1.224 $1.088
48 $1.740 $2.040 $1.836 $1.632
64 $2.320 $2.720 $2.448 $2.176

The AWS announcement of Graviton3 going into general production mentions that Snap Inc, operator of Snapchat and Bitmoji, plans to adopt the new silicon because it has proven faster than Graviton2. That is not great news for Google Cloud, as Snap signed a five-year, $2 billion deal with the ad giant in 2017. Five years later we discover that the social network operator has gone multi-cloud!

AWS's post announcing the C7 instances points out that migrating to Gravitons from x86 isn't hard for many workloads – especially if those workloads are AWS services like its own container and database services.

Which is utterly self-serving, but also an indicator that, as AWS brings more of its own services to its own silicon, trying Graviton silicon will become less onerous.

The timing of AWS's Graviton3 announcement appears not to have been coincidental, as it came a few hours before Nvidia revealed server designs based on its own high-end processors.

Perhaps AWS hoped to steal some of Nvidia's thunder.

Yet the combined effect of the two announcements may be more significant. Together they demonstrate that enterprise computing buyers can now consider multiple mature, well-backed technology choices beyond the x86 architecture. And there is more to come as Microsoft, Oracle, and others introduce their own Arm-powered servers, not to mention the imminent arrival of SmartNICs as accessible on-prem technology. ®

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