Amazon Web Services has announced new instances for EC2 in the shape of the C7g.
Announced at the company's AWS re:Invent event, the new instances will be powered by its newest processor, the Graviton3, which is aimed at what AWS labels as, compute-intensive workloads: HPC, batch processing, electronic design automation (EDA), media encoding, scientific modeling, ad serving, distributed analytics, and CPU-based machine learning inferencing.
So don't expect them to pop up in traditional web hosting environments although they can be used for bare metal hosting or in dedicated servers/VPS-like scenarios.
Graviton2 was announced in December 2019 and launched only in June last year while the original Arm-based Graviton was presented at re:Invent 2018.
This news is developing
Graviton3: What do we know?
Well, AWS says the new edition is 25% faster than the Graviton2, with 2x floating point performances and 3x improvements in machine-learning workloads. Power consumption will be 60% lower - although not much is known about the exact parameters.
They will run on DDR5 memory which should deliver a 50% increase in memory bandwidth. We don't know the core count, the architecture used or the core clock speed.
Graviton2 doubled the core count from the original 2018 model to 64-core and used the ARM Neoverse N1 architecture, a 7nm manufacturing process, which allowed it to reach 2.5GHz.
Graviton3 will face fresh competition from AMD and Intel. The former is expected to introduce its Zen 4 products in 2022 with processors using up to 128 cores on a 5nm process. Intel has already unveiled its Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" processors which brings DDR5 and PCIe 5.0 to the table.
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