Amazon introduces the most powerful ARM CPU ever: 64 cores with 55 billion transistors

After being introduced 6 months ago, Amazon has finally officially launched its third generation Graviton CPUs for its cloud AWS instances. Besides, Amazon also revealed about one of the most unique features of these CPUs: there are exactly 3 CPUs that will be plugged into a single board, nothing more, nothing less.

Amazon's Graviton series of CPUs are ARM processors designed and manufactured by the cloud giant in-house. They are present in virtually every AWS service for users and companies of any size. Amazon said that Epic Games, Formula 1 and Twitter are testing the new CPUs and they are interested in the Graviton3 instances that were released last week.

Amazon didn't go into the details of this CPU, only stating that Graviton3 has 64 cores in its compute chiplet. With a total of 7 chiplets, Graviton3 has about 55 billion transistors, almost double Graviton2 and more than AMD's 64-core Epyc Rome CPU.

In the figure below, you can see all 64 of these processor cores fit into a single chip die. South of the chip is a pair of PCIe 5.0 controllers and flanked by four DDR5 RAM controllers on each side.

64 processor cores packed in 1 die chip

Amazon says that the performance per core of Graviton3 is 25% faster than its 2020 predecessor. Across the core, its encryption and floating-point computation is twice as high, and the machine learning performance is three times higher than its predecessor. However, Graviton2 has only 16 cores, half the size of Graviton3.

Now AWS C7g instance can use Graviton3 with 64 vCPU or full processor. In the maximum configuration, this system will use 128 GB of DDR5 RAM with 30 Gbps network bandwidth.

Nitro card capable of managing 3 CPU pins simultaneously

Normally, server mainboards use a parallel approach when plugging in 1, 2 or 4 processors, but since Amazon views each CPU as a separate node, they can plug 3 CPUs into the motherboard as a Nitro card that manages all of the tasks like networking, security, and storage.