AWS re:Invent 2025 - AWS Graviton: The best price performance for your AWS workloads (CMP307)

AWS Graviton: Powering the Best Price-Performance for Your Workloads

Overview of AWS Graviton

• AWS has been building custom silicon for over a decade, including Nitro chips for offloading storage and networking, and chips for accelerating machine learning.
• The Graviton line of processors is AWS's powerful and efficient core compute infrastructure, offering the best price-performance for a broad array of workloads.
• Graviton also provides energy efficiency benefits, helping customers reduce their carbon footprint.
• Over 90,000 AWS customers are using Graviton today, ranging from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises.
• AWS offers a deep and broad portfolio of Graviton-based instance types, with over 300 available globally across 38 regions.

The Graviton Journey

• Graviton 1 (2018) focused on getting the software ecosystem running on ARM 64 architecture.
• Graviton 2 (2019) opened up general-purpose applications to run on Graviton.
• Each generation has improved performance, capabilities, and energy efficiency:
  • Graviton 3 (2021) provided 25% higher performance per core.
  • Graviton 4 (2023) had 50% more cores, enabling scale-up workloads.
• The latest Graviton 5 chip, announced at re:Invent 2025, is the most powerful and energy-efficient Graviton yet.

Graviton 5: The Latest and Greatest

• Graviton 5 doubles the core count from Graviton 4, with 25% higher performance per core.
• Built on a 3nm process, Graviton 5 features:
  • Neoverse V3 cores with larger branch predictors and advanced prefetchers.
  • 192MB of L3 cache, 5.3x larger than Graviton 4.
  • Support for DDR5-800 memory with sub-100ns latency.
  • PCIe Gen 6 connectivity with half a terabyte per second of I/O.
  • NUMA architecture with two NUMA regions to reduce memory latency.
• The new M9G instances powered by Graviton 5 offer industry-leading performance, up to 25% better than Graviton 4, and the best price-performance in EC2.

Security Innovations with Graviton

• The Nitro hypervisor is purpose-built for isolation, with no operator access and mechanisms to enforce customer isolation.
• Graviton has introduced security innovations over the generations, including DRM encryption, PCIe encryption, and CPU attestation.
• The new Nitro Isolation Engine, written in Rust and formally verified, further compartmentalizes critical interactions with instance memory, devices, and access control.
• Formal verification mathematically proves the Nitro Isolation Engine's specification matches the implementation, ensuring memory safety and preventing unauthorized information leakage.

Designing and Building Graviton

• AWS collaborates with EDA tool vendors like Siemens and Synopsys to enable their tools on Graviton, achieving 20-40% performance improvements.
• Graviton 5 shows 35-40% performance gains for EDA workloads like Caliber, VCS, and Fusion Compiler compared to previous generations.

Graviton Performance Across Workloads

• CPU-based machine learning workloads see up to 35% performance improvement on Graviton 5 compared to Graviton 4.
• Java applications like Grails see 32% higher requests per second on Graviton 5.
• Large monolithic applications see up to 47% performance increase on Graviton 5.
• NGINX load balancing shows 27% better performance on Graviton 5.
• MySQL database workloads see 40% higher performance on Graviton 5.

Customer Success Stories

• Snowflake saw over 30% higher performance on Graviton 5 instances compared to previous generations.
• Honeycomb observed 20-25% lower latency and 36% better throughput on Graviton 5.
• Airbnb found Graviton 5 instances to be 25% faster than other EC2 instances tested.
• SAP HANA Cloud saw 35-60% performance improvements on Graviton-based instances for OLTP workloads.

Atlassian's Graviton Journey

• Atlassian, a major AWS customer, has been using Graviton since Graviton 2 to power its Jira, Confluence, and other cloud-based products.
• After an initial failed attempt to migrate to Graviton 3, Atlassian worked closely with AWS to properly test and understand the performance characteristics of Graviton 4.
• Atlassian saw a 32% throughput increase, 12% latency reduction, and 25% cost savings by moving its Jira and Confluence web servers to Graviton 4.
• The company has since expanded Graviton adoption across its entire infrastructure, including databases, achieving over 30% Graviton usage within one year.
• Atlassian's testing of Graviton 5 has shown a promising 30% throughput improvement, attributed to the increased L3 cache size.

Best Practices for Transitioning to Graviton

• Broad support for ARM 64 across the Linux ecosystem, container platforms, and DevOps tools.
• AWS Graviton Partner Program to enable third-party software vendors to optimize their offerings for Graviton.
• Seamless integration of Graviton into AWS managed services, allowing easy migration.
• Guidance on the effort required for different application types, from interpreted languages to compiled code.
• Tools like the Graviton Technical Guide, AWS Transform, and Aperf to aid in the migration and performance analysis.
• Recommendations to start with a Canary or Blue-Green deployment approach to test Graviton in production.

Key Takeaways

• Graviton provides industry-leading price-performance and energy efficiency for a wide range of workloads on AWS.
• The latest Graviton 5 chip doubles the core count, increases cache sizes, and introduces advanced security features.
• Customers across various industries have seen significant performance improvements and cost savings by adopting Graviton.
• AWS provides a comprehensive set of resources and tools to help customers seamlessly transition their workloads to Graviton.
• Graviton is a strategic investment by AWS, continuously pushing the boundaries of custom silicon development and cloud computing performance.