AWS Announces Graviton3
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Amazon Web Services announced Graviton3 at re:Invent in November 2021 as the third generation of its custom ARM-based server processor. The chip was designed for AWS rather than sold as a general retail CPU.
Graviton3 used Arm’s 64-bit instruction set and added support for DDR5 memory and instructions useful for scientific computing, cryptography, and machine learning. AWS claimed substantial performance-per-watt improvements over the previous Graviton generation.
The processor was strategically important because cloud providers were no longer satisfied with buying only standard x86 server CPUs. By designing its own silicon, AWS could tune cost, power, memory, and instance types around workloads seen in its data centers. Google and Microsoft were pursuing similar custom-chip strategies.