It was announced a few months ago, but its deployment has finally begun. The American giant has begun to implement the Amazon Graviton3, a high-performance processor that is based on the ARM architecture, and that comes configured with a maximum of 64 cores. It is a very interesting solution not only because of its high core count, but also because this chip is based on a modular design with 7 chiplets, and because it can be used in configurations of up to three sockets.
We still do not have all the technical keys of the Amazon Graviton3, but from what the American company has confirmed, we know that its 64 cores are integrated into a single chiplet. In the diagram that you will find just below these lines you can see the distribution of the 7 chiplets to which we have referred. In the center we have the largest, which is the one that groups those 64 CPU cores, on the sides we have the DDR5 memory controllers, which occupy a total of four chiplets, and in the lower part the PCIe Gen5 system, which is grouped into two chiplets.
The cover image lets us see what those 7 chiplets look like with their packages. It goes without saying that they are interconnected and integrated on a common substrate, and integrated into an overall package that makes them easy to install on a compatible motherboard. According to Amazon, with all chiplets combined, the Graviton3 has a total of 55 billion transistors. For comparison purposes, we remind you that the Ryzen 9 5950X, which has 16 x86 cores, adds 4.15 billion transistors.
When it comes to performance, Amazon has confirmed that the Graviton3 is 25% faster in single core than its predecessor, released in 2020. Doing a comparison with all active cores, its performance in floating point operations and in encryption have doubled, and in deep learning it has tripled. Not bad at all, but if we consider that the Graviton2 only has 16 cores, these results are no longer so impressive, but rather “what could be expected”.
AWS C7g instances using the Amazon Graviton3 chip are available and offer configurations of up to 64 vCPUs, which is equivalent to a complete chip. The user can choose between different configurations of RAM, with a maximum of 128 GB of DDR5, and a network bandwidth of 30 Gbps. Amazon hasn’t forgotten about those who need a cheap and modest configuration, and therefore offers the possibility of starting from only one vCPU.
