It really is incredible how ARM basically commoditized processors (in a good way).
I would much rather see some kind of mandatory open market sale of all cpu lines so that in theory you can run graviton procs in rackspace, apple m5 servers in azure, etc.
Yes and maybe no. They do "cheat" in that internal / managed services often use Graviton where possible. It works out cheaper without the Intel / AMD "tax".
[Disclaimer, I'm CEO of Vantage - the company that maintains the site]
Or is your value proposition for companies that use a bunch of different cloud providers ?
Thank you for maintaining this, I do use it every few months at $DAYJOB and it's quite useful for my capacity/deployment planning.
I find this often useful to quickly compare similar instance types, e.g.: m7g vs. m8g vs. m9g.
AWS introduces Graviton5–the company's most powerful and efficient CPU (14 comments)
I've been experimenting FEX on Ampere A1 with x86 game servers but the performance is not that impressed
I need a reference point so I can compare it to Intel/AMD and Apple's ARM cpus.
Otherwise it is buzzwords and superlatives. I need numbers so I can understand.
Core per core it pales compared to Apple's superlative processors, and falls behind AMD as well.
But...that doesn't matter. You buy cloud resources generally for $/perf, and the Graviton's are far and away ahead on that metric.
Neoverse V3 is the server version of the Cortex-X4 core which has been used in a large number of smartphones.
The Neoverse V3 and Cortex-X4 cores are very similar in size and performance with the Intel E-cores Skymont and Darkmont (the E-cores of Arrow Lake and of the future Panther Lake).
Intel will launch next year a server CPU with Darkmont cores (Clearwater Forest), which will have cores similar to this AWS Graviton5, but for now Intel only has the Sierra Forest server CPUs with E-cores (belonging to the Xeon 6 series), which use much weaker CPU cores than those of the new Graviton5 (i.e. cores equivalent with the Crestmont E-cores of the old Meteor Lake).
AMD Zen 5 CPUs are significantly better for computationally-intensive workloads, but for general-purpose applications without great computational demands the cores of Graviton5 and also Intel Skymont/Darkmont have greater performance per die area and power consumption, therefore lower cost.
That is not entirely accurate. X4 is big core design. All of its predecessor and successor has always had >1mm2 die space design. X4 is already on the smaller scale, it was the last ARM design before they went all in chasing Apple's A Series IPC. IRRC it was about 1.5mm2 depending on L2 cache. E-Core for Intel has always been below 1mm2. And again IRRC that die size has always been Intel's design guidelines and limits for E-Core design.
More recent X5 / X925 and X6 / X930 / C1 Ultra?? ( I can no longer remember those names ) are double the size of X4. With X930 / C1 Ultra very close to A19 Pro Performance. Within ~5%.
I assume they stick with X4 is simply because it offers best Performance / Die Space, but it is still a 2-3 years old design. On the other hand I am eagerly waiting for Zen 6c with 256 Core. I cant wait to see the Oxide team using Zen 6c, forget about the cloud. 90%+ of companies could fit their IT resources in a few racks.
Don't they still offer free nano EC2s? This is not a better price than $0.
It seems obvious to me that AWS using their market dominance to shift workloads to Graviton.
I believe the main motivator for AWS is efficiency, not performance. $ of income per watt spend is much better for them on Graviton.
The competitive advantage right now is in NVIDIA chips and I guess AWS needs all their free cash to buy those instead of non-competitive advantage CPUs.
Meanwhile, when AWS announces a new chip its probably something they have already been building out in their datacenters.
