Last year Amazon announced its intention to become a new player in the semiconductor industry such as AMD, Intel, VIA or Qualcomm for the sake of its cloud computing survival. The Seattle-based company announced that it plans to develop a new generation of custom chips that will power the company’s cloud computing servers and help reduce dependence on the giant Intel. It is recalled that Santa Clara’s x86 processors currently account for more than 90% of the server chip market, although AMD is making a strong comeback to the market with its new x86 EPYC ROME CPUs based on Zen 2 and 7 nm, embedding up to 64 cores / 128 threads.
This announcement was later reflected in the release of the group’s first x64 processors. They were based on the ARM architecture (Arm Cortex-A72 according to some sources), engraved in 16 nm and internally designed (their design was created by Israeli design house Annapurna Labs, which was acquired by the Seattle-based company in 2015). According to Amazon, these new arm chips codenamed Graviton could generate cost savings of up to 45% for scalable services of cloud computing technologies.
AWS Graviton 2 chip for enhancing cloud computing services
Recently, the Amazon division responsible for on-demand cloud computing services for businesses and consumers – Amazon Web Services (AWS) – confirmed the launch of the second generation x32 / x64 arm CPU, developed by and for the specific needs of the business. AWS has introduced a new x32 / x64 processor based on the Arm v8.2 architecture that Reuters says should embed up to 32 cores. The new chip, which does not yet have a codename (some sources suggest that Graviton 2), will be the key element in a new platform called Neoverce N1, which will replace the Cosmos platform that supports Graviton.
Amazon’s new arm chip will benefit from the 7nm gravure process and, like its predecessor, should be able to handle different workloads for the cloud infrastructure. Amazon’s new chip would benefit from an innovative storage architecture. Its TDP should be about 100 watts at a maximum clock frequency of about 3 GHz.
It should be noted that since 2018 AMD has announced the signing of a strategic HPC partnership with the giant Amazon. Amazon will begin using more systems based on AMD’s EPYC processors for its cloud activities at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon is already using EPYC-based systems to host its EC2 or Elastic Cloud Compute instances, which offer Amazon “secure and scalable cloud computing power designed to facilitate web-based cloud computing for developers”. Amazon reported a 10% cost reduction by migrating from Intel Xeon servers to EPYC servers.
Source: Reuters