AWS Launches Graviton5, Its Most Powerful Custom CPU for EC2

AWS has introduced its fifth-generation Graviton processor, Graviton5, which the company says delivers up to 25% higher performance than its previous generation while improving energy efficiency. 

The chip will power new Amazon EC2 M9g instances, now available in preview. C9g (compute-focused) and R9g (memory-focused) instances are planned for 2026.

AWS said the launch comes as organisations look for faster performance and lower costs at scale. “Graviton5 delivers up to 25% better compute performance than the previous generation while maintaining energy efficiency,” the company said in a blog post.

Core Specs and Performance Gains

The new processor includes 192 cores, offers a 5x larger L3 cache, and provides faster memory speeds. AWS said the design reduces inter-core communication latency by up to 33%, enabling workloads such as gaming, big data analytics, databases, and EDA tools to scale with higher throughput.

Network bandwidth increases by up to 15% on average, and Amazon EBS bandwidth increases by up to 20%. For the largest instances, network bandwidth doubles.

AWS said the chip is built on 3nm technology, and its server architecture uses bare-die cooling to improve efficiency.

Graviton5 instances run on the AWS Nitro System and include a new Nitro Isolation Engine, which uses formal verification to mathematically ensure workload isolation. AWS said this provides “a new standard for mathematically proven cloud security.”

Early Customer Results

AWS said more than half of its new CPU capacity added in the past three years is powered by Graviton. According to the company, 98% of the top 1,000 EC2 customers, including Adobe, Epic Games, Formula 1, Pinterest, Snowflake, and Siemens, already use Graviton-based instances.

Airbnb reported performance improvements of up to 25% during tests using its production search workloads. 

Atlassian said Jira testing on M9g instances showed 30% higher performance and 20% lower latency than the previous generation. “We look forward to AWS Graviton5 general availability,” said Paulo Almeida, principal site reliability engineer.

SAP said it saw OLTP query performance 35% to 60% better on SAP HANA Cloud. Siemens Digital Industries Software said early Graviton5 tests delivered another 30% performance boost for its Calibre platform. 

Synopsys reported up to 35% faster runtimes for EDA workloads and said Arm observed up to 40% faster runtimes for Synopsys VCS.