Amazon manufactures its processor. It's called Graviton and it's an ARM processor

For companies like Intel and AMD, the cloud computing market is a hen with gold eggs, but more and more, the cloud industry is getting closer to the creating proprietary hardware that meets your needs.

Amazon is one of these and has announced in recent hours the entry into its fleet of AWS Graviton, a processor based ARM architecture which will be at the center of the new EC2 instances. Graviton was not born overnight, but stems from an acquisition made by Amazon in recent years, when it brought in its ranks the Annapurna Labs.

Using proprietary hardware can give Amazon different benefits: can design a product more focused on specific loads, can emerge from the processor renewal calendar of companies like Intel and, at the same time, save money. An economy that can pocket or exploit to offer its customers services at lower cost, in order to attract more people.

For the moment, Amazon does not intend to use Graviton in all its cloud systems, but it is an additional way to do it. diversify and reduce the risks of using a sole source. The agreement between AWS and AMD for the use of EPYC processors has been concluded in recent weeks.

So the company seems to want to give up a bit of Intel, especially at a time when the Santa Clara house is facing a huge demand for CPUs and efforts to satisfy all customers. Of course, we are certain that Amazon will never be empty of Intel chips, but it is quite understandable that the company of Jeff Bezos wants to have some leeway.

The giant cloud computing he has not published any excellent information on Gravitonbut an advertised article offers more information. First, according to the head, AWS is already close to the integration of ARM chips developed by AMD into its systems in the past.. "Until early 2015, Amazon and AMD were working together on a 64-bit ARM server processor." But the project failed when, according to a reliable industrial source, AMD failed to meet the performance specifications defined by the partner.

As we know, AMD has been working for some years on the 64-bit ARM architecture, announcing the Opteron A1100 (codename Seattle, the city where Amazon is based …), a product that has never happened. Thus, apparently, Amazon purchased the ARM license and SoC designer Annapurna Labs, which was originally intended to apply to IoT solutions and the Nitro chipset for network and storage management in Amazon EC2.

The new birth of the designers of Annapurna is Graviton. According to "The Register", the processor is a mix of "pure" and corrective ARM solutions implemented internally and it is based on 2.3 GHz Cortex-A72 ARM cores with 64-bit support. Hardware acceleration does not fail for floating point calculations, SIMD units, and support for various algorithms such as AES, SHA-1, SHA-256, GCM, and CRC-32. "Instances with 16 virtual CPUs are available in four quad-core clusters with 2 MB of shared L2 cache per cluster, 32 KB of data L1 cache and 48 KB of L1 instructions per core."