Amazon unveils AWS Graviton 2 processor, a powerful data center chip, to take on Intel and AMD

Move over Intel Corp and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. Amazon, the tech giant that is already dominating other markets, is about to make its foray into microprocessor design and upend many decades of domination by the two major market leaders. Today,  Amazon Web Service (AWS), the cloud division of Amazon, unveiled the next generation of its ARM processors, the Graviton2 specifically designed for for data center operations. According to the announcement, the AWS Graviton 2 processor is estimated to be seven times faster than the first-generation processor.

“They deliver 7x performance, 4x the number of compute cores, 2x larger caches, and 5x faster memory compared to the first-generation Graviton processors,” the company said.

AWS Graviton2 processors deliver a major leap in performance and capabilities over first-generation AWS Graviton processors. They power Amazon EC2 M6g, C6g, and R6g instances that provide up to 40% better price performance over comparable current generation instances1 for a wide variety of workloads, including application servers, micro-services, high-performance computing, electronic design automation, gaming, open-source databases, and in-memory caches. The AWS Graviton2 processors also provide enhanced performance for video encoding workloads, hardware acceleration for compression workloads, and support for CPU-based machine learning inference.

The processor also comes with enhanced security for cloud applications. AWS added: “Developers building applications for the cloud rely on cloud infrastructure for security, speed and optimal resource footprint. AWS Graviton2 processors feature key capabilities that enables developers to run cloud native applications securely, and at scale, including always-on 256-bit DRAM encryption and 50% faster per core encryption performance compared to first-generation AWS Graviton. Graviton2 powered instances are built on the Nitro System that features the Nitro security chip with dedicated hardware and software for security functions, and support encrypted EBS storage volumes by default.”