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The new Graviton2 SoC is a custom design by Amazon's own in-house silicon design teams and is a successor to the first-generation Graviton chip. The new chip quadruples the core count from 16 cores to 64 cores and employs Arm's newest Neoverse N1 cores. Amazon is using the highest performance configuration available, with 1MB L2 caches per core, with all 64 cores connected by a mesh fabric supporting 2TB/s aggregate bandwidth as well as integrating 32MB of L3 cache.
Amazon claims the new Graviton2 chip is[sic] can deliver up to 7x higher performance than the first generation based A1 instances in total across all cores, up to 2x the performance per core, and delivers memory access speed of up to 5x compared to its predecessor. The chip comes in at a massive 30B transistors on a 7nm manufacturing node - if Amazon is using similar high density libraries to mobile chips (they have no reason to use HPC libraries), then I estimate the chip to fall around 300-350mm² if I was forced to put out a figure.
The memory subsystem of the new chip is supported by 8 DDR4-3200 channels with support for hardware AES256 memory encryption. Peripherals of the system are supported by 64 PCIe4 lanes.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Snotnose on Wednesday December 04 2019, @12:45AM (8 children)
Amazon is making server chips. They don't need floating point, that's a big chunk of silicon. They don't need default graphics for those cheapskates that are trying to avoid buying a $500 graphics card, that's a huge chunk of silicon. Their cores don't need to talk to each other so much, so they are saving a hell of a lot on multi-core interconnects. They don't care so much about other threads sniffing cryptographic keys, so instruction pipelines et all can go full speed.
Not having a problem seeing how Amazon's custom built chips can give Intel's general purpose chips a good ass whipping. In fact, it's pretty much a textbook case of why you make custom silicon.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Wednesday December 04 2019, @01:39AM
https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2019/12/announcing-new-amazon-ec2-m6g-c6g-and-r6g-instances-powered-by-next-generation-arm-based-aws-graviton2-processors/ [amazon.com]
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(Score: 5, Informative) by sgleysti on Wednesday December 04 2019, @01:42AM (1 child)
vs.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday December 04 2019, @01:48AM
Also, they seem to be comparing it to Skylake-SP Xeons like Xeon Platinum 8175, that don't come with integrated graphics.
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(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 04 2019, @01:46AM
Almost everything in this post is wrong, I'll add to the others that have been pointed out and note that giving an ass whipping to Intel's chips is not interesting. AMD Epyc cpus are the benchmark now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 04 2019, @04:11AM (1 child)
Amazon server chips go into AWS, where everybody's code runs, including amazon's - so they care.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday December 04 2019, @05:12PM
How many AWS clients know enough to know whether they care?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday December 06 2019, @12:10AM
Any follow-up on these guesses?
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(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday December 06 2019, @12:40AM
The dozen or so followups said exactly how I was wrong in this post. Yet I'm still insightful?
sigh
Those followups reminded me I retired 10 years ago and I'm not exactly up to date anymore. Which is sad, I bought a TRS-80 in '78 and grew up with personal computing, making my living with embedded software.
I'm old. At least I still have a warm lap for a cat to curl up in.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday December 04 2019, @02:53AM (4 children)
What undocumented data collection features are baked into the silicon?
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday December 04 2019, @08:59AM
These chips are running at Amazon... you don't even have physical access.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 04 2019, @01:26PM (2 children)
1-Click with new and improved cyber blockchain AI, is now baked into the silicon. Every time you click your mouse, type on your keyboard, or tap on a mobile device, a portion of your money is transferred directly from your bank account or cryptowallet directly into Amazon's.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 05 2019, @02:20AM (1 child)
Source? This is what I have been looking for but do not see it in TFA.
(Score: 2) by Walzmyn on Friday December 06 2019, @02:36PM
[insert gif of joke flying over stick figure]