During its traditional keynote night at re:Invent, AWS announced quite a bit of new hardware in its cloud tonight, starting with a new version of its Nitro hypervisor, new instance types, and a new version of its custom Arm-based Graviton chips it is specifically designed to power high-performance computing workloads. This new Graviton3E chip – a variant of the existing Graviton line – promises significant performance improvements, including 35% better performance for workloads that rely heavily on vector instructions.
These new chips will obviously power new AWS EC2 instance types, starting with the logically dubbed Hpc7G. This new instance type comes in a variety of sizes, with up to 64 vCPUs and 128 GiB of memory. However, it will take until early 2023 for these instances to become available. For more network intensive workloads, AWS is also launching a new Graviton 3E instance type (c7gn).
For Intel fans there are also new Ice Lake based Xeon based machinesat.
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All of these new instances will use the new version of AWS Nitro 5 hardware hypervisor, which the company also announced today. Nitro v5 promises significantly improved latency, up to 40% better performance per watt and 60% higher PPS. The AWS team made this possible by roughly doubling the number of transistors in the custom Nitro chips.
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“Performance can be hard to come by if you refuse to compromise on things like security and cost,” Peter DeSantis, senior vice president of AWS Utility Computing, said in tonight’s keynote. And in many ways, that has long been the story of AWS’ compute platform and its work on its custom processors.
