At its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday, Amazon Web Services announced its most potent proprietary processor to date. This is another step forward in the cloud provider’s plan to become less dependent on conventional chip makers. According to AWS, the Graviton5 maintains energy efficiency while providing up to 25% better computational performance than its predecessor.
The fifth-generation processor has a cache five times bigger than the previous generation and 192 cores, which is twice as much as Graviton4, which was released in July 2024. For memory-intensive tasks, quicker application response times are made possible by each core’s ability to access 2.6 times more L3 cache. Additionally, the CPU provides an average 15% increase in network bandwidth and a 20% increase in Amazon Elastic Block Store bandwidth, with the largest instances experiencing up to twice the network bandwidth.
Initial Customer Outcomes Display Enhancements In Performance
Businesses that tested M9g instances based on Graviton5 reported significant gains. According to Airbnb, performance improvements of up to 25% over alternative same-generation system architectures and up to 20% over Graviton4 were observed in its production search workloads. When evaluating the new M9g instances, Atlassian found that Jira had 20% reduced latency and 30% better performance.
With 98% of the top 1,000 Amazon EC2 clients—including Adobe, Epic Games, Formula One Group, Pinterest, SAP, Siemens, Snowflake, and Synopsys—already utilizing Graviton instances, Graviton processors are powering more than half of the new CPU capacity deployed to AWS for the third year in a row.
Formal Verification Provides Increased Security
Alongside Graviton5, AWS also unveiled the Nitro Isolation Engine, which uses formal verification to mathematically demonstrate that workloads are kept separate from one another and from AWS operators. Amazon referred to the technique as “a new standard for mathematically proven cloud security” since it uses mathematical proofs to guarantee that the system operates exactly as intended.
Starting on Wednesday, the Graviton5-based M9g instances—which are intended for general-purpose cloud workloads—will be accessible in preview. In 2026, AWS intends to introduce R9g instances for memory-intensive applications and C9g instances for workloads requiring a lot of computation. The CPU is based on Arm’s Neoverse V3 architecture and is constructed with 3nm technology.