AWS debuts new, home-grown, 192-cores Graviton4 CPUs that can support up to 3TB of RAM as it nibbles away Intel and AMD's memory advantage

At its AWS re:Invent 2023 event in November 2023, CEO Adam Selipsky unveiled the company’s Graviton4 chips, built on Arm’s “Demeter” Neoverse V2 core. These new processors were claimed to offer up to 30% better compute performance, 50% more cores, and 75% more memory bandwidth than the Graviton3 processors, aimed at boosting memory-optimized and compute-heavy workloads.

Graviton4-powered R8g instances became generally available in July 2024 and when Phoronix benchmarked it, the processor came in ahead of the Intel Xeon instance by about 5% and wasn’t too far behind AMD’s EPYC.

AWS has now stepped things up by introducing new memory-optimized X8g instances.

AWS Graviton4 x8g specs — (Image credit: AWS)

Improved performance

X8g instances are available in ten virtual sizes and two bare-metal configurations, featuring up to 3 TiB of DDR5 memory and 192 vCPUs. These instances are also considered AWS’s most energy-efficient EC2 offerings to date. With a 16:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio, the X8g instances are also equipped with full encryption across all high-speed hardware interfaces, and offer additional security features.

The X8g instances provide notable improvements over their predecessors, offering three times more memory and vCPUs than X2gd instances. They also double the EBS and network bandwidth, making them an attractive solution for memory-heavy workloads. Graviton4’s twice the L2 cache per core and 160% higher memory bandwidth contribute to up to 60% better compute performance.

In terms of real-world applications, AWS says X8g instances are already being used for SAP HANA and SAP Data Analytics Cloud, with performance gains of up to 40% for transactional workloads compared to Graviton3.

AWS notes the X8g instances allow users to scale up or out, providing flexibility for memory-bound applications currently running on distinct instances. The new instances are now available in US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), and Europe (Frankfurt) AWS regions, supporting various pricing models such as On-Demand, Spot, and Reserved Instances.