Amazon's Graviton Has Evolved Into A Formidable CPU Contender: Graviton1 To Graviton4 Benchmarks

Amazon's Graviton4 server processor that recently went into GA in the AWS cloud is easily the most competitive AArch64 server processor we've seen to date and proving capable of being able to compete with Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC processors across various workloads. Since Graviton4 went GA on AWS earlier this month I've looked at the Graviton4 comparison to other instances at 64 vCPUs and also comparing the Graviton4 96-core metal performance to various Intel, Ampere, and AMD processors. Given the interest in those Graviton4 benchmarks, today's article is another look at Graviton4 looking at the metal performance compared to prior generation Graviton3, Graviton2, and Graviton1 instances for showing just how far Amazon's Graviton processor performance has evolved.

With the two prior articles looking at the Graviton4 performance relative to other AWS instance types at the same vCPU count and then also at the "metal" performance to other Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC and Ampere Altra Max processors, this article today is just looking at the evolution of the AWS Graviton performance. The "metal" instances of Graviton1, Graviton2, Graviton3, and Graviton4 were looked at for seeing how the full capacity of AWS Graviton has evolved since its introduction.

Graviton1 as a reminder had 16 x Arm Cortex-A72 cores clocking up to 2.3GHz. Graviton1 launched in late 2018 as the first in-house AArch64 server processor at Amazon Web Services. The a1.metal instance was tested for showing the original Graviton performance.

Graviton2 took the in-house processor from 16 x A72 cores to 64 x Neoverse-N1 cores with eight channels of DDR4-3200 system memory. Besides quadrupling the core counts, the Graviton2 CPU cores clock up to 2.5GHz. The r6g.metal instance was used for benchmarking the Graviton2 performance at 64 cores. Graviton2 reached AWS customers in 2020.

Graviton3 in 2022 upgraded the sixty-four core design to using Neoverse-V1 cores, 2.6GHz clock speed, and eight channels of DDR5-4800 memory. The r7g.metal instance was used for looking at that 64-core Graviton3 performance.

Graviton4 hitting GA this month brings 96 cores of the Neoverse V2-V2 flavor while also packing 12 channels of DDR5-5600 memory. Graviton4 is initially available for R8g instance types and for benchmarking the r8g.metal-24xl instance was used for looking at that 96 core Graviton4 performance.

All of these AWS Graviton instances were freshly (re)benchmarked for this article using the same modern software stack. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS with the Linux 6.8 kernel and GCC 13.2 compiler was used for all of this benchmarking in looking at the evolution of the AWS Graviton CPU performance.

In addition to the raw benchmark results, the performance-per-core and performance-per-dollar for AWS on-demand pricing was also calculated. Unfortunately no CPU power sensors are exposed for these instances so I was unable to provide any power efficiency / performance-per-Watt metrics for this AWS benchmarking.