AMD and Intel have a formidable new foe but you’ll never guess who it is

Graviton2 is a game changer

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An unexpected rival has emerged that could giveIntelandAMDa run for their money, at least in the very lucrative server and cloud computing market.

Amazon’s new Graviton2 CPU has been tested extensively by Andrei Frumusanu fromour sister website AnandTech,and the results show this new kid on the block outstrips the incumbents when it comes to performance per dollar.

Graviton2 was tested against two other cloud computing resources offered by Amazon Web Services: the m5a (AMD EPYC 7571) and m5n (Intel Xeon Platinum 8259CL Cascade Lake). Andrei found it could offer savings of up to 54%, which he says represents “a massive shakeup for the AWS and EC2 ecosystem.”

Fine-tuned for AWS workloads

So, how did Amazon achieve these results? The chip comes from Annapurna Labs and packs 64 A76ARMcores - similar to what you can find in a smartphone - with 33MB cache and a high clock speed. Amazon is Annapurna Labs' only customer (as its owner), which means the processor is extremely fine-tuned for AWS workloads.

According to Andrei, unless you’re tied to the x86 platform, you’d be “stupid not to switch over to Graviton2 instances” once they become more widely available for everything fromVPN(AWS VPN) toweb hosting(AWS Light Sail).

For now, expect AMD’s EPYC2 processors to put up a bit of a fight - at least until Graviton3 lands.

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Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled inwebsite buildersandweb hostingwhen DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.

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