This repository is meant to help new users start using the Arm-based AWS Graviton and Graviton2 processors which power the latest generation of Amazon EC2 instances. While it calls out specific features of the Graviton processors themselves, this repository is also generically useful for anyone running code on Arm.
- Building for Graviton
- Optimizing for Graviton
- Recent software updates relevant to Graviton
- Language-specific considerations
- Containers on Graviton
- Known issues and workarounds
- Additional resources
The Graviton CPU (powering A1 instances) supports Arm V8.0 and includes support for CRC and crypto extensions.
The Graviton2 CPU (powering M6g/M6gd, C6g/C6gd, and R6g/R6gd instances) uses the Neoverse-N1 core and supports Arm V8.2 plus several other architectural extensions. In particular, Graviton2 supports the Large System Extensions (LSE) which improve locking and synchronization performance across large systems. In addition, it has support for fp16 and 8-bit dot productions for machine learning, and relaxed consistency-processor consistent (RCpc) memory ordering.
Please refer here for debugging and profiling information.
There is a huge amount of activity in the Arm software ecosystem and improvements are being made on a daily basis. As a general rule later versions of compilers and language runtimes should be used whenever possible. The table below includes known recent changes to popular packages that improve performance (if you know of others please let us know).
| Package | Version | Improvements |
|---|---|---|
| PHP | 7.4+ | PHP 7.4 includes a number of performance improvements that increase perf by up to 30% |
| PCRE2 | 10.34+ | Added NEON vectorization to PCRE's JIT to match first and pairs of characters. This may improve performance of matching by up to 8x. This fixed version of the library now is shipping with Ubuntu 20.04 and PHP 8. |
| ffmpeg | 4.3+ | Improved performance of libswscale by 50% with better NEON vectorization which improves the performance and scalability of ffmpeg multi-thread encoders. The changes are available in FFMPEG version 4.3. |
Please refer here for information about running container-based workloads on Graviton.
As of July 7th 2020, Cassandra will fail to install via Debian package on Graviton instances running Ubuntu or other Debian-based distros. (Full details in the open JIRA ticket.) The workaround is to specify amd64 as the desired arch. Cassandra is not arch-specific, so the "amd64" package works normally:
deb [arch=amd64] https://downloads.apache.org/cassandra/debian 311x main
Note that Redhat variants like Amazon Linux 2 avoid this issue. In our out of box Cassandra performance testing (early July 2020), Amazon Linux 2 using the Corretto 8 JDK outperformed Ubuntu 20.04 by up to 23%.
Linaro and Arm maintain a tool (Sandpiper) to search for packages across multiple OSes and Docker official images. This can be useful to see which versions of a package exist in distributions -- especially when there is a performance improvement in a particular version.
Some specific resources:
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