Cloud Hosting

The Graviton2 in all its ... erm ... glory

Amazon Web Services has flicked the switch for a new instance type powered by the second generation of its custom Arm CPUs the Graviton2.

As we noted at launch, the Graviton2 is built with a 7nm process and offers 64-bit Arm Neoverse N1 CPU cores, each with 1MB of level 2 cache while each chip has 32MB of shared level 3 cache.

The newly-live instance type is the EC2 M6g and comes in eight variants that run from one to 64 vCPUs.

AWS suggests the new instance type is best-suited to application servers, microservices, gaming servers, mid-size data stores, and caching fleets. And its secured testimonials from early users including Netflix, which said We tested the new M6g instances using industry standard LMbench and certain Java benchmarks and saw up to 50% improvement over M5 instances.

M5 instances run Intel Xeon Platinum 8175M CPUs.

Now AWS has its own silicon that can outperform those Xeons in some applications. And thats with one of the wimpier instance types it has planned for the Graviton2. M-series instances are general-purpose compute rigs. The cloud colossus has also promised C-series high-performance instances and R-series memory-optimised instances that use its own silicon. More variants "with local NVMe-based SSD block-level storage will also be available in the coming months", AWS says.

While cheaper cloud servers are lovely, theyre no use if the code your business relies on cant run on em. While plenty of code runs on Arm, Intels ecosystem-creation efforts are extensive, few enterprise products have ported to Arm and those that have, like VMwares ESXi, havent exactly found customers clamoring for the architecture . Which wont trouble those who indulge in the bounty of open source Arm-ware or shops like Netflix content to conduct bespoke development if itll save some coin.

The launch of the EC2 M6g instance is therefore a notable milestone in the evolution of Arm as an enterprise platform. But the story clearly has a long way to run.

As does AWS' use of Xeons: late last week it announced a new set of price cuts for the M-series, C-series and R-series instances when bought using its Reserved Instances or EC2 Instance Saving Plans.

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AWS unleashes custom Arm processor the Graviton2 in new EC2 M6g instance type - The Register