Amazon Talks Up Big Performance Gains For Their 7nm Graviton2 CPUs

We weren't too enthusiastic about the performance of Amazon's initial Graviton ARM-based CPU cores offered via their Elastic Compute Cloud, but their next-gen Graviton2 CPUs that are "coming soon" should be much more capable for good ARM Linux performance.

If Amazon's numbers are accurate, Graviton2 should deliver a big performance boost for Amazon's ARM Linux cloud potential. Graviton2 processors are 7nm designs making use of Arm Neoverse cores. Amazon says they can deliver up to seven times the performance of current A1 instances, twice the FP performance, and support more memory channels as well as doubling the per-core cache.

Amazon's estimates put their Graviton2 CPU cores at offering around 43% better SPECjvm performance, 44% better for SPEC CPU, about 24% faster for Nginx, 43% higher for Memcached, and about a 26% improvement with H.264 video encoding.

Graviton2 instances should be available on Amazon EC2 in 2020. More details via the AWS blog. Once those instances are available, I will of course be running some benchmarks of our own for seeing how the Graviton2 CPUs really perform.