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 the cloud. Ampere is challenged in that all the hyperscale cloud providers – AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Meta – are making their own custom chips rather than using a third-party processor.

But the challenge of getting Arm into enterprise data centers lies in all the legacy code. There are a lot of homegrown and packaged applications written for x86 processors that are not available for Arm, which will lead some enterprises to stick with x86 infrastructure.

Since its introduction in 2018, Graviton has gone through four generations, which is a considerable pace for a company with no silicon design experience.

In July 2024, AWS announced the launch of its fourth-generation Graviton CPU, touting its energy efficiency and high performance for cloud workloads. Graviton4 offers a significant performance upgrade over Graviton3, with 30% better computing power, 50% more cores and 75% more memory bandwidth. The new Graviton4 instances, called R8g, support up to 8GB of memory per virtual processor and up to 192 processors.

Other hyperscalers have also been able to jumpstart Arm projects.

Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Nvidia have quickly brought their respective enterprise efforts to market thanks to a custom compute subsystem from Arm called Arm CSS, which helps partners by providing extra subsystems like memory and interconnections. The hyperscalers then differentiate their designs from the competition by using different networking and security protocols, among other things.