AWS launches Graviton4 Chip

What did Amazon release?

Amazon's unleashed their newest cloud computing chip, AWS Graviton4. Which is now generally available. Recall, Amazon Graviton CPU's are Arm-based and designed specifically for Cloud workloads. Recall AWS offered a AWS Graviton4 preview at last years AWS re:Invent event. The Graviton4 chip has been Beta tested for several months by 100 customers. So they hype has already been building as they report feedback to Amazon AWS.

Amazon started building their own chips back in 2018

By building its own chip, Amazon has more control over its fate! And in today's tariff driven world perhaps its good that Amazon developing their own chips. There might be a new market developing for these chips due to political currents in the world. 

I feel it is also important to point out that in 2021 Amazon started building own chips to take on NVIDIA in the AI realm.

Benefits from the new chipset?

• Amazon has stated that the Graviton4 is 30% faster & 75% more memory bandwidth.  Let's break that down:
  offers up to 50 Gbps network bandwidth
• and up to 40 Gbps EBS bandwidth compared to up to 30 Gbps network bandwidth and up to 20 Gbps EBS bandwidth on Graviton3-based R7g instances.
• It provides the Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA), which supports higher and better Turn-points. You can use the bundle of storage services it offers 
• it supports AWS's Inferentia and Trainium chips, which are focused on the GPU technology.

What are the Graviton4 Specifications?

Put simply its a 96-core ARM CPU with 536.7 Bandwidth

What is the AWS Instance name - R8g

R8g instances are designed for Graviton4 chips and all manner of Linux-based workloads, including containerized and micro-services-based applications using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) and high-end workloads like high-performance databases, in-memory caches, and real time big data analytics.

Image(s) Credit - Amazon AWS re:Invent 2023

Chipset Outcomes?

AWS Graviton4-based Amazon EC2 instances deliver the best performance and energy efficiency for a broad range of workloads running on Amazon EC2. Driven by 30% better computing power, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth. 

Summary 

Amazons is promoting R8g instances by talking about their energy efficiency for memory-intensive workloads in EC2, but it did not give numbers or specifics.  These action indirectly promote Graviton4 chip use. Wondering how this will impact Enterprise EC2 costs month over month and year over year? Or will Amazon adjust EC2 pricing so that costs continue to rise?