Amazon Web Services Inc.’s Arm-based Graviton processors were created with the goal of optimizing real-world EC2 workloads for price and performance. With the launch of the second-gen Graviton2, that performance uptick has taken an impressive leap.

“We say 40% performance improvement, but when our customers have gone and tried this, they’ve seen upwards of 50%, depending on the workload,” said Raj Pai (pictured), vice president of EC2 product management at AWS.

Pai spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event. They discussed advances in Arm-based architecture, Graviton performance statistics and the AWS Graviton challenge. (* Disclosure below.)

Graviton surprises with its simplicity of implementation and broad workload applications

“AWS’ secret weapon” is how theCUBE’s Dave Vellante described the company’s advancements in Arm-based architecture. His breaking analysis predicted that through Arm, AWS “is pointing the way to a revolution in system architecture.”

Pai’s description of AWS’ aim is more down-to-earth. “Like with everything else we do in AWS, it’s all about innovating on behalf of our customers,” he said. “It’s about how do real-world workloads perform and how do we build systems that optimize that performance? And with Graviton, we were able to hit the nail on the head.”

Revolution or not, Arm is on the rise, and AWS is encouraging customers to test out the potential of Arm-based architecture in its Graviton Challenge. Described by Pai as a “set of blueprints” to migrate, execute and run a partial workload on Graviton, the process surprises customers with its simplicity.

“There’s very little lift in comparison to what people think it’s going to be,” Pai stated.

Customers are also surprised at how broadly applicable Graviton is across a variety of use cases and workloads, according to Pai.

“We have different form factors of compute. We have memory-optimized instances that are good for databases and in memory caches. We have compute optimized for [high performance computing] and workloads that really take advantage of the performance of the chip, and then we have general-purpose workloads,” he said. “We introduced Graviton variants of all those instance families, and we’re actually seeing the same sort of performance benefits across workload.”

That applicability will continue to expand thanks to AWS’ commitment to long-term investment in its hardware ecosystem, according to Pai. And that includes use cases for 5G and edge computing.

“The key for us is to be ubiquitous and have compute power everywhere our customers need it in the form factors they need it,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event. Neither Amazon Web Services Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE