AWS Graviton4 is the latest ARM chip powering AWS data centers, but it may also signal bad news for Intel and AMD’s place in the server market.

AWS announced Graviton4 in mid-July, saying the chip was four times faster than the first-gen version, while using 60% less energy for the same performance as similar Amazon EC2 instances. In other marketing, the company promised a 30% improvement over the previous generation Graviton3.

Phoronix has put the new chip through its paces, benchmarking it against AMD’s EPYC, Intel’s Xeon, and Ampere Altra. The results were telling, with only the AMD EPYC outperforming the Graviton4. Meanwhile, the AWS chip handily outperformed Intel’s Xeon and practically stomped on the Ampere Altra.

Phoronix’s Michael Larabel shared his thoughts:

Overall from the mix of workloads tested on the Graviton4 96-core metal instance (r8g.metal-24xl) I was rather surprised and impressed by the performance of this Armv9.0 server processor. The performance was often competitive to Intel Sierra Forest / Emerald Rapids and AMD Genoa(X) / Bergamo. Though, unfortunately, was unable to provide any remote power results for Graviton4 due to no power sensors being exposed for the r8g.metal-24xl instance when testing.

For the mix of 32 benchmarks run, the Graviton4 processor overall was the most advanced AArch64 server performance we’ve seen to date. Hopefully we’ll be getting our hands finally on AmpereOne soon for seeing how that AArch64 competition is fairing and all the more interesting due to hands on access with power monitoring with those chips set to be available in the retail channel compared to Graviton4 just running in the confines of AWS.

The results are good news for AWS, and ARM computing in general, and could spell the beginning of a major shift in the server market. ARM already has significant advantages in power consumption and heat generation over traditional x86 chips. With the performance gap closing, companies may look more seriously at ARM-based chips.