Amazon announces new Graviton 3 processors that work with C7g instances

Amazon has released a new generation of its Graviton processors. The Graviton 3 for data centers are 25 percent faster than their predecessors and are intended to power new EC2 C7g setups in AWS.

Amazon announced the new processors at its annual AWS re:Invent conference. The new ARM-based chipset is intended to handle memory-intensive tasks with relatively low consumption. Amazon says the Graviton 3 is about 25 percent faster than the 2019 Graviton 2, although the company does not give any specifications. In addition to the better performance for calculations, that for floating points has also doubled, as has that for cryptographic calculations. In fact, CPU-based machine learning workloads perform three times better, according to AWS. With the latter, Graviton 3 has support for bfloat16 and fp16.

The CPUs are intended to drive new EC2 C7g VMs in AWS. These are intended for heavy workloads such as high performance computing, machine learning or video encoding. The C7g instances are the first cloud products that can run on DDR5 memory, Amazon says. C7g also has twenty percent more network bandwidth to work with. The new chips can only be used as a preview for the time being. The company does not say when C7g instances with the Graviton processors will be ready to use.