Intel and AMD won’t like that: Detailed benchmarking of Amazon Graviton4 shows fantastic performance/price — this is the biggest server CPU threat yet to x86 duopoly and it won’t go away

The fourth-generation AWS Graviton4 processor, now generally available, is a high-performance CPU based on Arm Neoverse-V2 cores, boasting significant improvements over its predecessor.

It features 96 cores, providing on average 30% higher compute performance and 40% faster performance for databases and Java software.

If you’re wondering how it compares with Intel and AMD rivals (and its predecessors), Phoronix has the answer. The site benchmarked five AWS instances in the “16xlarge” configuration, each with 64 vCPUs and 512GB of memory. Graviton4 (r8g.16xlarge) was pitted against Graviton3 (r7g.16xlarge), Graviton2 (r6g.16xlarge), AMD EPYC 9R14 (r7a.16xlarge), and Intel Xeon 8488C (r7i.16xlarge). The instances were tested using Ubuntu 24.04 with the Linux Kernel 6.8 and stock GCC 13.2 compiler.

Impressive performance

The Graviton4 performed impressively across the full range of tests and in the Geometric mean of all the test results it came in second behind AMD’s EPYC processor – and you can view all of the test results here.

The results matched with Amazon’s own claims for its processor, with Graviton4 slightly ahead of the Intel Xeon instance by about 5%, although AMD’s EPYC processor continues to lead by approximately 25% in overall performance.

Michael Larabel, Phoronix founder, noted, “We are at the stage where the Neoverse-V2 cores with Graviton4 are effectively matching Intel Sapphire Rapids core-for-core and depending upon the workload also matching or outperforming AMD 4th Gen EPYC. Of course, Graviton4 just went GA and will be going up against AMD EPYC Turin and Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids in the coming months.”

While Intel and AMD will continue to lead in terms of sheer performance, Graviton4 isn’t too far behind. It currently leads in ARM64 server performance, and given the generational leap AWS made with its latest processor, it will be interesting to see what improvements it will bring with Graviton5.

Graviton4 test results