Amazon’s Graviton4 CPU is the latest in its line of Arm-based server processors, promising improved performance and security features. It offers up to 30% better compute performance and 75% more memory bandwidth compared to its predecessor.
Graviton4 focuses on security with features like Branch Target Identification (BTI), which mitigates against branch prediction attacks. This is the first CPU in the line to include BTI, a component of the Arm architecture designed to protect against sophisticated cyber threats while delivering significant performance gains.
All high-speed interfaces on Graviton4 are encrypted, making it unique among cloud providers. It also supports Pointer Authentication and Branch Target Identification generally available.
Graviton4’s Security Features:
* Branch Target Identification (BTI) marks certain target memory addresses as “valid” to prevent speculative execution of potentially malicious code.
* Pointer Authentication adds a cryptographic signature to authenticate memory pointers, helping thwart attacks that alter data in memory.
* Data is encrypted across high-speed hardware interfaces, including Graviton’s memory and AWS Nitro cards.
Graviton4 Computing Power:
* The fourth generation in Amazon’s Graviton CPU architecture, launched in November 2018.
* Designed specifically for Amazon Web Services (AWS).
* Core count has increased from 16 to 96 cores.
* Architecture moved from Arm’s general-purpose Cortex cores to the server-specific Neoverse N2.
* L2 cache size expanded from 8MB to 192MB.
ECS2 instances powered by Graviton4 deliver up to a 30% performance increase over Graviton3, with third-parties like SmugMug and SAP experiencing 20-40% improvements.
Source: https://spectrum.ieee.org/aws-graviton4