Amazon recently announced Graviton2, its 2nd generation processor that are designed for use in servers and data centres. Announced at the company’s annual AWS re:Invent conference, the processor is based on the 7nm die lithography and uses ARM’s Neoverse N1 CPU architecture.
According to Amazon, Graviton2 is designed to work on three different EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances: general purpose, compute-optimised, and memory-optimised. In regards to its performance, the brands says that Graviton2 will be capable of delivering up to “a sevenfold performance increase” in comparison to its predecessor.
Additionally, Graviton2 features a 64-cores layout, as opposed to the initial rumours that the CPU will be powered half that number at 32-cores. On a technical level, Graviton2 showed significant improvements over its predecessor in certain per-vCPU benchmarks. The new processor saw an increase of 24% in SPEC CPU 2017 floating point, and a 44% boost in SPEC CPU 2017 integer.
The announcement of Graviton2 is also another clear sign of Amazon’s intent of moving ARM processors into the data centre ring. As pointed out by TechRadar, the data centre realm is an area that is currently dominated by Intel and its Xeon processor, albeit under threat of invasion of AMD and its own EPYC data centre CPUs.
