Also hedging its bets with a healthy dose of Nvidia chips too
Re:Invent On Tuesday Amazon Web Services has unveiled its next-gen Graviton4 CPUs and Trainium2 AI accelerators at its Re:Invent shindig, which it claims will deliver a healthy boost in performance and efficiency in machine learning.
Amazon showed off its latest Arm-compatible CPU, unsurprisingly dubbed Graviton4. Since launching its first-gen Graviton CPUs in 2018 Amazon has seen healthy demand for its custom processor family. To date, the cloud giant claims it’s built more than two million Graviton chips, which are used by 50,000-plus customers across 150 instances.
“Graviton4 marks the fourth-generation we’ve delivered in just five years and is the most powerful and energy efficient chip we have ever built for a broad range of workloads,” said David Brown, VP of compute and networking at AWS.
The fourth generation of the design has a claimed 30 percent boost in compute performance, 50 percent higher core density, and 75 percent more memory bandwidth, compared to Graviton3. We’ll note the latter was kind of a given, considering the higher core count and maturity of DDR5.
The chip will offer up to 96 cores and will be supported by 12 channels of DDR5 5600MT/s memory. At the time of publication it wasn’t clear which Arm cores Graviton4 is using. Graviton4 also gains support for encrypted traffic for all of its physical hardware interfaces.
To start, Graviton4 will be available in Amazon’s memory-optimized R8g instances, which are tailored toward workloads like high-performance databases, in-memory caches, and big data analytics. These instances will support larger configurations with up to 3x more vCPUs and 3x more memory compared to the older Rg7 instances which topped out at 64 vCPUs and 512GB RAM.
