Since the introduction of Zen, AMD has been able to compete with Intel in the x86 server market, but Amazon was not willing to rely on AMD alone. Therefore, Amazon invested in Graviton ARM and hoped to compete with Intel with its self-developed chip offerings.
Amazon’s Graviton ARM processor was an attempt not to rely on Intel, a sixteen-core processor based on Cortex A72 ARM processing cores with a clock frequency of 2.3 GHz. The only real drawback is that the Cortex-A72 is designed primarily for high-end smartphones, so it can’t compete with any of the high-end x86 products.
The register has shed some light on Amazon’s oldest ARM server plans, which sources claim AMD’s ARM-based Opteron A1100 series processors are designed specifically for Amazon’s cloud work. These plans were never achieved, and AMD could not achieve all the performance milestones that Amazon had set.
AMD’s Opteron A1100 was launched in early 2016 and offered up to eight Cortex A57 CPU cores, making it significantly weaker than Amazon’s Graviton ARM processors. Amazon’s ARM processors come from Annapurna Laboratories, which were acquired by Amazon in 2015. Amazon’s custom Graviton ARM processor is almost the Opteron A1100 processor based on AMD’s ARM.
Opteron A1100 was the basis for Amazon’s Graviton ARM processor
Now, the advent of AMD’s Zen-based EPYC processors, which offer the cloud computing giant a great opportunity to reduce its dependence on Intel. Amazon already offers its customers cheaper AWS instances when they use AMD’s EPYC series processors, demonstrating the benefits of a competitive market in the world of server CPUs.