AWS Announces 4th Generation Graviton General Purpose Compute SoC: Scale-up Apps, Dual-Socket-Capable

Today, AWS announced its fourth-generation general purpose datacenter SoC, which gives the company an even better ability to address scale-up applications like database and ERP with its own silicon. The instances are now in customer preview. I have written a lot about AWS’s home-grown silicon spanning from Nitro to Graviton to Inferentia and to Trainium. The company combines merchant silicon from AMD, Intel, Marvell, and NVIDIA in addition to its own. This provides optionality to its customers and the ability to reduce its costs and prices and increase performance for certain workloads.

The company says the following about Graviton4 versus Graviton3:

• 30% better compute performance and 50% more cores (96 Arm Neoverse V2 cores for single socket, 2M L2 cache per core)
• 75% more memory bandwidth with 12 DDR5-5600 channels
• 96 lanes PCIe G5 · 7 chiplet SoC design
• Encrypted DRAM, Nitro, Coherent links
• Multi-socket (really) supporting 192 cores and 3X DRAM of Graviton3

AWS says it is “delivering the best performance and energy efficiency for workloads running on Amazon EC2” which I believe is an overall statement compared to Intel and AMD. CEO Adam Selipsky reinforced this with the “best price performance on EC2” statement. The company showed some very compelling benchmarks on MySQL and Java. It’ll take me some time to grind out comparisons to Intel, AMD, and what Microsoft released two weeks ago.

While I need more research on price and performance versus Intel, AMD, and Microsoft, without that, I can easily say AWS and its silicon team have raised the bar… again. On general-purpose compute, AWS has cautiously under-committed and over-delivered on Graviton, being very instructive on the right apps to run and how to shift from x86 to Arm. G1 focused on a small set of “scale-out” apps like web front end, G2 increased performance, opening itself to more apps, G3 increased platform performance to pull in ML, HPC and SIMD. Now G4 completes the family addressing scale-up apps like database and ERP.

While SAP HANA isn’t yet certified for G4, the quotes by SAP on what they’re seeing in previous Gravitons are impressive. Juergen Mueller, CTO and member of the Executive Board of SAP SE. “As part of the migration process of SAP HANA Cloud to AWS Graviton-based Amazon EC2 instances, we have already seen up to 35% better price performance for analytical workloads. In the coming months, we look forward to validating Graviton4, and the benefits it can bring to our joint customers.”All the proof I need that establishes Graviton as a serious ERP player as SAP is a very conservative company dealing in mission-critical ERP applications that can't break.