In 2018, AWS released the first version of Graviton suitable for open-source and non-performance-critical scripting workloads as part of its A1 instance family.[2] The second generation, AWS Graviton2, was announced in December 2019 as the first of its sixth generation instances, with AWS promising 40% improved price/performance over fifth generation Intel and AMD instances[3] and an average of 72% reduction in power consumption.[4] In May 2022, AWS made available Graviton3 processors as part of its seventh generation EC2 instances, offering a further 25% better compute performance over Graviton2.[5]
The first Annapurna Labs silicon product launched under the AWS umbrella was the AWS Nitro hardware and supporting hypervisor in November 2017.[6] Following on from Nitro, Annapurna began to develop general-purpose CPUs using its expertise.
The benefits AWS anticipated included:
Offering more choice in terms of selection of EC2 instances for customers
Offering decent server performance with lower prices for customers
The first Graviton processor reached these goals. Graviton2 now offers better performance compared to X86-64: 35% faster runningRedis,[7] 30% faster runningApache Cassandra,[8] and up to 117% higher throughput forMongoDB.[9] In addition to higher performance, Graviton offers 70% lower power consumption[10] and 20% lower price.[11]
The Graviton2 CPU has 64Neoverse N1 cores, withARMv8.2-AISA including 2×128 bitNeon, LSE,fp16, rcpc,dotprod, crypto. The vCPUs are physical cores in a singleNUMA domain, running at 2.5 GHz.[14]
EC2 instances with Graviton2 CPU: M6g, M6gd, C6g, C6gd, C6gn, R6g, R6gd, T4g, X2gd, G5g, Im4gn, Is4gen, I4g.[15] One or more of these instances are available in 28 AWS regions.
Compared to Graviton2, Graviton3 provides up to 25% better compute performance, up to 2× higher floating-point performance, up to 2× faster cryptographic workload performance, up to 3× better performance formachine learning workloads including support forbfloat16, and 50% more memory bandwidth. Graviton3-based instances use up to 60% less energy for the same performance than comparable EC2 instances.[16]
Graviton3E is a higher power version of Graviton3.[17]
EC2 instances with Graviton3 CPU: C7g, M7g, R7g; with local disk: C7gd, M7gd, R7gd.
The Graviton4 CPU has 96Neoverse V2 cores, withARMv9.0-AISA[18] plus the SVE2-crypto[19] extension. It has 2 MB of L2 cache per core (192 MB total), and 12 DDR5-5600 memory channels. Graviton4 supports Arm's Branch Target Identification (BTI).
Amazon claims that Graviton4 is up to 40% faster for databases, 30% faster for web applications, and 45% faster for large Java applications than the Graviton3.
Graviton5 is the fifth-generation custom Arm-based server processor developed by Amazon Web Services for use in Amazon EC2, announced in December 2025.
It is designed for general-purpose, compute-intensive, and memory-intensive cloud workloads, and features up to 192 CPU cores per chip, the highest core density in EC2 at launch. Compared with the previous generation, Graviton5 provides up to 25% higher compute performance, reduced inter-core communication latency of up to 33%, and a five-times larger shared L3 cache, giving each core significantly more cache access and improving performance for cache- and memory-sensitive applications.
The processor uses 3 nm manufacturing technology, supports higher memory speeds, and offers increased I/O capabilities, including up to 15% higher network bandwidth and up to 20% higher Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) bandwidth on average, with up to twice the network bandwidth on the largest instances.
Graviton5-based instances are built on the AWS Nitro System, which offloads virtualization and I/O to dedicated hardware and enforces a zero-operator-access security model; the generation also introduces the Nitro Isolation Engine, a formally verified component intended to provide mathematically proven workload isolation. Amazon EC2 instances powered by Graviton5 include the M9g general-purpose family, with C9g and R9g compute- and memory-optimized families planned for later release.
^Liguori, A (2018)."The Nitro Project–Next Generation AWS Infrastructure"(PDF).Hot Chips: A Symposium on High Performance Chips. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).Archived(PDF) from the original on 7 October 2024. Retrieved13 October 2023.
