AWS Graviton
AWS Graviton is a family of Arm-based processors designed by Amazon Web Services for use in EC2 instances and other AWS services, offering better price-performance and energy efficiency compared to equivalent x86-based instances for many…
Definition
AWS Graviton is a family of Arm-based processors designed by Amazon Web Services for use in EC2 instances and other AWS services, offering better price-performance and energy efficiency compared to equivalent x86-based instances for many workloads.
Overview
AWS Graviton processors are custom silicon built on the Arm Neoverse architecture, designed in-house by Amazon (via its Annapurna Labs acquisition) specifically for cloud data center workloads rather than adapted from consumer or general-purpose chip designs. Since the original Graviton launched in 2018, AWS has released successive generations — Graviton2, Graviton3, and Graviton4 — each improving core count, memory bandwidth, and performance per watt over its predecessor and over comparable x86 instances. Graviton-based EC2 instances (identified by a 'g' in the instance type, such as m7g, c7g, or r7g) typically offer 20-40 percent better price-performance than equivalent x86 instances for many workloads, including web servers, containerized microservices, databases, and big data processing. Because Graviton uses the Arm64 architecture rather than x86-64, software must be compiled for arm64, which for many modern languages and frameworks (Java, Python, Go, Node.js, Rust) works out of the box or requires only a rebuild, though native binary dependencies sometimes need arm64-specific builds. Beyond raw EC2 instances, Graviton has been adopted as the underlying compute for many AWS managed services, including AWS Lambda (arm64 runtime option), Amazon RDS, Amazon ElastiCache, Amazon EMR, and AWS Fargate, letting customers benefit from the price-performance improvement without managing instances directly. Adoption of Graviton is a common cost-optimization lever: because the instances are billed at lower rates while often delivering comparable or better throughput, migrating compatible workloads from x86 to Graviton is frequently one of the highest-leverage, lowest-risk cost reductions available on AWS, provided the workload's dependencies support arm64.
Key Features
- Custom Arm-based (Neoverse) processors designed by AWS
- Multiple generations: Graviton2, Graviton3, Graviton4, each improving performance
- 20-40% better price-performance versus comparable x86 instances for many workloads
- Requires arm64-compiled binaries, unlike x86-64 instances
- Available across EC2, Lambda, RDS, ElastiCache, EMR, and Fargate
- Improved energy efficiency and performance-per-watt over x86 alternatives
- Widely supported by modern language runtimes and container base images
- A common lever for AWS cost optimization when workloads are arm64-compatible