- AWS becomes the first cloud provider offering rentable PCIe 6.0 processors
- Graviton5 combines 192 Arm cores with 96 PCIe lanes
- Memory bandwidth exceeds 800GB/s across AWS’s latest server platform
AWS has quietly achieved a milestone that neither AMD nor Intel reached first in commercially available cloud infrastructure by deploying a PCIe 6.0-capable processor.
The company’s Graviton5 CPU is now generally available through Amazon EC2 M9g and M9gd instances, allowing customers to rent PCIe 6.0 hardware by the hour.
While that development sounds significant on paper, practical benefits remain difficult to identify for most users at the current stage of deployment.
PCIe 6.0 arrives in the cloud before it reaches most hardware
Graviton5 was developed by Annapurna Labs and adopts a chiplet design built on TSMC’s 3nm manufacturing process technology.
The processor combines four compute dies containing 48 Arm v3 cores each, bringing the total core count to 192.
AWS says each core carries 1MB of dedicated cache, while the platform integrates 12 DDR5 memory channels operating at speeds up to DDR5-8800.
According to company figures, the memory subsystem can deliver more than 800GB/s of aggregate bandwidth across demanding workloads.
The processor also includes 96 PCIe 6.0 lanes, making it the first cloud CPU customers can actively access with PCIe 6.0 connectivity.
Communication between chiplets relies on a coherent interconnect capable of transferring data at 420GB/s while maintaining unified operation.
AWS claims Graviton5 can deliver performance improvements reaching 25% compared with earlier generations deployed across its infrastructure.
Additional figures suggest application workloads may run 35% faster, while database…
