Amazon Web Services has introduced its fifth-generation Graviton processor, positioning it as the company’s most powerful and energy-efficient CPU yet for Amazon EC2 workloads.
AWS Launches Graviton5 and M9g
The new AWS Graviton5 chips power a fresh family of Amazon EC2 M9g instances that target a broad range of general-purpose workloads, from application servers and databases to analytics and EDA.
Built on advanced 3 nm process technology, Graviton5 is designed to deliver up to 25% higher compute performance than the previous Graviton4 generation while maintaining a strong focus on power efficiency.
With this launch, AWS continues to expand its in-house silicon strategy, noting that Graviton now accounts for more than half of new CPU capacity added to its cloud and is used by 98% of its top 1,000 EC2 customers.
Architecture and Performance Highlights
Each Graviton5 package integrates 192 CPU cores, giving EC2 the highest core density in its portfolio and enabling customers to scale up on a single instance rather than relying solely on horizontal scaling.
The design shortens inter-core communication paths, reducing latency between cores by up to one-third and increasing bandwidth to support demanding, highly parallel workloads such as gaming backends, real-time analytics, and EDA flows.
To keep data closer to the cores, Graviton5 includes a 5x larger shared L3 cache, with each core seeing about 2.6x more cache than in Graviton4, which helps reduce stalls and improve application responsiveness.
AWS has also boosted memory performance and I/O, with higher memory speeds, around 15% more network bandwidth and roughly 20% more Amazon EBS bandwidth on average across sizes, and up to 2x the network throughput on the largest instances to accelerate distributed and data?intensive applications.
Security and Nitro Isolation Engine
Graviton5 continues to build on the AWS Nitro System, using sixth-generation Nitro Cards to offload networking, storage, and virtualization functions so that nearly all server compute and memory resources are exposed directly to customer workloads.
The platform maintains a “zero-operator access” model, preventing AWS staff or other systems from logging into EC2 hosts or inspecting instance memory or customer data.
A key new element is the Nitro Isolation Engine, which uses formal verification techniques and a minimal, mathematically proven code base to ensure strong isolation between customer workloads and AWS operators.
AWS plans to provide select customers with access to the implementation and proofs so they can independently review the security model, signaling a push toward more transparent, rigorously validated cloud isolation.
Early Customer Momentum
A range of large cloud customers across media, gaming, SaaS, manufacturing, and enterprise software are already seeing measurable gains from moving workloads to Graviton-based instances.
Adobe, Epic Games, Formula 1, and Pinterest are using Graviton to handle real?time streaming, online gaming, telemetry analytics, and large-scale personalized content delivery, taking advantage of the improved price-performance profile.
In early tests of the new generation, Airbnb reports up to 25% better performance on its production search workloads compared with other architectures of the same generation, and up to 20% over Graviton4, with especially strong improvements in tail latency for critical paths.
Atlassian has migrated thousands of Jira and Confluence instances to Graviton and is seeing about 30% higher performance and 20% lower latency when testing Jira on M9g instances versus the prior generation, while Siemens, SAP, and Synopsys cite double?digit percentage boosts in EDA runtimes and OLTP query performance, along with notable compute cost reductions.
AWS Perspective on Graviton5
AWS frames Graviton5 as a response to customers who want to scale increasingly complex cloud workloads without trading performance for cost or sustainability goals.
By combining a 192 core design, a much larger cache hierarchy, faster memory, and higher network and storage bandwidth with a 3 nm process and bare-die cooling, the company positions Graviton5 as a way to run more work per watt and per instance, cutting both infrastructure spend and environmental footprint.
On the security front, AWS emphasizes that integrating Graviton5 tightly with the latest Nitro System and the Nitro Isolation Engine raises the bar for cloud isolation, particularly for regulated sectors such as government, healthcare, and financial services.
