Amazon unveils Graviton2 soc for servers with 64 Arm Neoverse N1 cores

Amazon has unveiled its second soc for servers based on Arm architecture. The Graviton2 has 64 cores, four times as many as the first chip. In addition, it concerns the new Neoverse N1 cores, which are largely comparable to the Cortex-A76 cores for smartphones.

According to Amazon, the Graviton2 is made on a 7nm process and the soc delivers up to 7x the performance of the first model. Amazon will deploy the new chip in its EC2 M6g, C6g and R6g instances, resulting in up to 40 percent better price-performance ratios compared to the first Graviton soc, the company says.

Amazon designed the chip itself based on the architecture provided by Arm. There is 1MB of L2 cache per core, AnandTech reports. The 64 cores are connected via a mesh fabric with a bandwidth of 2TB/s and the chip has 32MB L3 cache. There are eight ddr4-3200 memory channels and there is support for aes256 memory encryption. The chip offers 64 PCI-e lanes. According to Forbes, it is a large chip with 30 billion transistors.

In benchmarks, Amazon pits its soc against a Xeon Platinum 8175. That is an x86 processor from Intel with 24 cores that is used in the M5 instances. The Arm chip scores 24 to 54 percent better, according to Amazon. Amazon’s Graviton2 is the successor to the Graviton soc that has been available in EC2 instances since late last year. That chip contained 16 Neoverse E1 cores, which is a derivative of the older Cortex-A65AE design.