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DeSantis tells the story of how original EC2 performance was subject to jitter, as a result of the virtualisation mechanism. To solve this, they built AWS Nitro, the hardware virtualisation platform that underpins the whole AWS cloud.

The latest edition of compsci classic "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" covers the architecture of Nitro and the AWS Graviton hardware. Neat.

Dave Brown, VP, AWS Compute & ML Services takes the stage to talk about Graviton, Amazon's custom ARM-based chip which delivers excellent price/performance compute on AWS.

Each Graviton generation is improved based on data about how the previous one performed on real workloads. L2 cache misses in Graviton 3 were having a real impact on performance, so Graviton 4 doubled the size of the L2 cache per core, added more cores, and increased the size of the L3 cache too.

Graviton 4 also provided a coherent link between cores, to enable 192 vCPU cores, but this introduced new latency paths. Graviton 5 improves that, doubling the number of cores, and increasing the L3 cache by 5.3x. These are now available in preview, as part of M9g EC2 instances.

A speaker from Apple tells us they've started using their language Swift to develop backend systems, and deploy these to Graviton. Amazon Linux now has a native toolchain for developing Swift, the first distribution to provide one.