Dec 04, 2019 12:37:00

Amazon Web Services Announces Next-Generation ARM Processor “Graviton 2” with 7nm Process

Amazon's cloud computing business,

Amazon Web Services (AWS), event ' AWS re: Invent 2019 ' will be held in Las Vegas from December 2 to 6, 2019. During the keynote speech by CEO Andy Jassie of AWS, the next generation ARM processor “ Graviton 2 ” of AWS original design was announced.

AWS Graviton-Amazon Web Services
https://aws.amazon.com/jp/ec2/graviton/

Coming soon – general purpose, compute optimized, memory optimized instance with Graviton2 processor | Amazon Web Services Blog
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/news/coming-soon-graviton2-powered-general-purpose-compute-optimized-memory-optimized-ec2-instances/

AWS Graviton2: What it means for Arm in the data center, cloud, enterprise, AWS | ZDNet
https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-graviton2-what-it-means-for-arm-in-the-data-center-cloud-enterprise-aws/

According to Jassie, the new Graviton 2 is a 7nm manufacturing process based on the 64-bit ARM Neoverse core and is an AWS-designed processor optimized for cloud computing. In floating point arithmetic processing, the performance will be doubled from the previous generation chip, and it seems to show up to 7 times the performance of the A1 instance at the maximum. The number of transistors installed in Graviton 2 is 30 billion.

“We have decided to design the chip to provide more functionality. Many companies have used x86 architecture chips for a long time, “We wanted to improve cost performance and developed an ARM architecture chip,” he said in a keynote, “Still, Intel and AMD continue to be major AWS partners.”

Jassie also announced the M6g, R6g, and C6g instances with Graviton 2 based on the AWS Nitro System. According to AWS, the virtual CPU processing performance of the new instance has improved by 20% to 40% from all generations, and the video encoding benchmark score has increased by 26%. The benchmark score by Cadence's logic simulator Xcelium seems to have improved by 54%.

Here is the new instance announced!
M6g, R6g, C6g. Built with the new Graviton processor. Designed and built with 7 nm silicon. About 40% cheaper than x86 processors, this Graviton 2 chip can handle huge workloads. #reInvent pic.twitter.com/YmTWhlb0nX

— AWS / Amazon Web Services (@awscloud_jp) December 3, 2019

The three Graviton 2-based instances are as follows: The instance type with d at the end indicates that NVMe local storage is installed.
General-purpose (M6g and M6gd): Up to 64 virtual CPUs and up to 256GB of memory.
Computing optimization (C6g and C6gd): Up to 64 virtual CPUs and up to 128GB of memory.
Memory optimization (R6g and R6gd): Up to 64 virtual CPUs and up to 512GB of memory.

In addition to the existing security functions provided by the AWS Nitro System, the data on the memory held only in the server is encrypted with a 256-bit key generated at startup.

AWS services such as Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon ElastiCache, and Amazon Elastic Map Reduce are scheduled to be migrated to a production environment with Graviton 2 instances in 2020.