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AWS Unveils Graviton3 Chips To Power New Heavy-Duty Instance
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has unveiled a new instance type for compute-intensive workloads that will run on the next generation of its popular Graviton processor.
Adam Selipsky announced the new Graviton3 chip on Tuesday during his first re:Invent keynote as AWS CEO (he replaced Andy Jassy, now Amazon.com's CEO, earlier this year). The Graviton3 chip, like the Graviton and Graviton2 before it, is based on high-performance Arm micro-architecture aimed at the server market. AWS touts these general-purpose processors as delivering high performance with good cost savings for cloud workloads running on Amazon EC2.
When it comes to price performance, the Graviton2 is 40 percent better than x86-based instances, according to AWS. The new Graviton3 promises even more improvements.
"Graviton3 chips are another big leap forward -- 25 percent faster on average for general compute workloads than Graviton2, and they perform even better for certain specialized workloads," Selipsky said. "They provide two times faster floating point performance for scientific workloads, are two times faster for cryptographic workloads, and three times faster for ML workloads."
Graviton3 chips are also more energy-efficient, he added, consuming 60 percent less energy to achieve the same performance level as comparable processors.
A new EC2 instance type powered by the Graviton3 also made its debut on Tuesday, the C7g instance. Now in preview, the C7g is designed for particularly heavy workloads, including high-performance computing, batch processing, scientific modeling and more.
AWS evangelist Jeff Barr briefly described the C7g instance in a blog post Tuesday. It's the first cloud instance in the market to support DDR4 memory, he said, which will give it "50% higher bandwidth than the DDR4 memory used in the current generation of EC2 instances."
Interested customers can sign up for the C7g preview here.