Graviton progress: 50% of new AWS instances run on Amazon custom silicon

Graviton’s success could impact Ampere, which makes Arm-based processors for both the enterprise and cloud. The problem with Ampere is that all hyperscale cloud providers – AWS, Microsoft, Google and Meta – make their own chips instead of using a third party processor.

But the problem with bringing Arm into enterprise data centers is all the legacy code. There are many native and packaged applications written for x86 processors that are not available on Arm, which will lead some enterprises to stick with x86 infrastructure.

Since its introduction in 2018, Graviton has gone through four generations, a significant step for a company with no experience in semiconductor design.

In July 2024, AWS announced the release of its fourth generation Graviton processor, highlighting its energy efficiency and high performance for cloud workloads. Graviton4 offers significant performance improvement compared to Graviton3with 30% more processing power, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth. The new Graviton4 instances, called R8g, support up to 8 GB of memory per virtual processor and up to 192 processors.

Other hyperscalers have also been able to give Arm projects a boost.

Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Nvidia have quickly brought their enterprise designs to market thanks to Arm’s custom compute subsystem called Arm CSS, which helps partners by providing additional subsystems such as memory and connectivity. Hyperscalers then differentiate their designs from competitors by, among other things, using different networking and security protocols.