AWS Announces Graviton3E CPUs for HPC and New Nitro v5

Edge9 was present at Re:Invent 2022the annual conference of AWS held in Las Vegas, where the company announced several innovations regarding the hardware it develops and produces for its cloud services. The two most significant announcements are undoubtedly Graviton3Ea processor designed for high-performance computing applications, and Nitro v5chip on which the Nitro hypervisor that manages virtual machines runs.

AWS Announces CPU for HPC Graviton 3E and Nitro v5

With more and more businesses needing access to high-performance computing, the challenge is meeting demand effectively and efficiently. Modeling, simulations, data analysis, machine learning model training all require high performance, but it is not easy to find it, especially when it comes to public cloud.

AWS has previously released high-performance instances of EC2, but the company has now unveiled a new family of processors targeted specifically for HPC. Is called Graviton3E and, as the name implies, it is a derivative of the Graviton3 family introduced last year. Compared to those processors, the new CPU offers better performance in running vector instructionsespecially important in areas such as engineering simulations.

This performance increase adds up to the one already present compared to the previous generation of instances for high-performance computing: the Graviton3 processors, in fact, offer 25% higher performance in general, and equal to double in the case of floating point operations and cryptographic.

To the improvements due to the new CPUs are added those deriving from the new ones DDR5 memoriesas well as those related to performance in network transfers, which are now arriving up to 200Gbps.

AWS also announced Nitro v5, the chip that runs its hypervisor (also called Nitro). The new chip offers significantly better performance than the previous generation: we see a 60% increase in network packets handled per secondone 30% lower latency And 40% higher performance per watt. This significant result was obtained also thanks to a doubling of the transistors used in the construction of the chip.

Thanks to the conjugation of Graviton3E and Nitro v5 AWS presented the c7gn instances, which deliver up to 200 Gbps network transfers, up to 50% better packet processing performance, and twice as many packets per second per virtual CPU. The new c7gn instances with Graviton3E processors will feature up to 64 cores and 128GB of RAM. They are already available in preview.

Similar data also applies to HPC7g instances, but they don’t offer the same performance in packet processing. They will be available in early 2023 in configurations up to 64 vCPUs and 128GB of RAM.