AWS Graviton4

AWS Graviton4 represents Amazon's most ambitious custom silicon effort to date, delivering a generational leap over its predecessor that reshapes the economics of cloud computing. Built on a 5nm custom process and featuring 96 Neoverse V2 ARMv9 cores running at 2.8 GHz with 2MB of L2 cache per core, Graviton4 is purpose-engineered for the cloud workloads that dominate modern infrastructure. The processor delivers 40% faster database workloads compared to Graviton3, making it the default recommendation for PostgreSQL, MySQL, and Redis deployments on AWS. Web application performance improves by 30%, while Java workloads — notoriously sensitive to memory latency — see a 45% acceleration thanks to architectural improvements in memory subsystem design. One of Graviton4's most compelling metrics is energy efficiency: it consumes 60% less energy per unit of performance compared to equivalent x86 instances, translating directly into lower operational costs and reduced carbon footprint for environmentally conscious enterprises. Memory bandwidth increases by 75% over Graviton3, eliminating bottlenecks for bandwidth-hungry applications like in-memory analytics and machine learning inference. With 50% more cores than Graviton3, Graviton4 scales vertically in ways that reshape consolidation ratios for containerized workloads. The processor powers five new EC2 instance families: M8g for general-purpose workloads, C8g for compute-intensive applications, R8g for memory-optimized deployments, X8g for large in-memory databases, and I8g for storage-intensive operations. Pricing runs approximately 20% cheaper than equivalent x86 instances, making the total cost of ownership argument nearly irresistible for cloud-native teams. AWS reports that major customers including Netflix, SAP, and Intuit have migrated critical workloads to Graviton4, with consistent reports of 30 to 50% cost reductions at equivalent performance levels.