After being introduced six months ago, Amazon has officially launched its third-generation Graviton CPU for AWS instances on its cloud platform. Additionally, Amazon revealed one of the most unique features of these CPUs: exactly 3 CPUs will be mounted on a single board, no more, no less.
The Graviton CPU line from Amazon consists of ARM processors designed and manufactured by this cloud giant. They are available in nearly every AWS service for users and companies of any size. Amazon stated that Epic Games, Formula 1, and Twitter are currently testing the new CPU and are excited about the Graviton3 instances that were unveiled last week.
Amazon did not delve into the detailed specifications of this CPU but mentioned that the Graviton3 features 64 cores within its compute chiplet. With a total of 7 chiplets, the Graviton3 contains approximately 55 billion transistors, nearly double that of the Graviton2, and even more than AMD’s 64-core Epyc Rome CPU.
In the diagram below, you can see all 64 processing cores neatly packed within a single die chip. At the south end of the chip is a pair of PCIe 5.0 controllers, and on either side are 4 DDR5 RAM controllers.
64 processing cores packed in a single die chip
Amazon stated that the performance per core of the Graviton3 is 25% faster than its predecessor launched in 2020. Overall, its floating-point and encoding capabilities are double that of its predecessor, and its machine learning performance is three times that of the previous model. However, Graviton2 only has 16 cores, which is one-fourth of Graviton3.
Currently, the AWS C7g instance can utilize Graviton3 with 64 vCPUs or the entire processor. In its maximum configuration, this system will use 128 GB of DDR5 RAM with a network bandwidth of 30 Gbps.
Nitro card capable of managing 3 CPU sockets simultaneously
Typically, server motherboards adopt a parallel approach that allows for 1, 2, or 4 processors to be installed. However, since Amazon views each CPU as a separate node, they can mount 3 CPUs on a motherboard, which is a Nitro card used to manage all tasks such as networking, security, and storage.
