Is your AWS bill climbing while performance plateaus? Choosing between AWS Graviton, Intel, and AMD isn’t just a technical preference – it’s a financial decision that could slash your compute spend by up to 40% without sacrificing a millisecond of speed.
Engineering leaders often stick with Intel (x86) because it is familiar, but staying in your comfort zone is expensive. As cloud-native architectures evolve, the performance-to-price gap between Amazon’s custom silicon and traditional processors has become too wide to ignore.
The architectural showdown: ARM vs. x86
The primary difference lies in how these processors handle tasks. Intel and AMD use the x86 architecture, which relies on Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) or hyperthreading. This presents two virtual cores (vCPUs) for every one physical core. While this is effective for certain operations, it can lead to resource contention that degrades performance under heavy load.
In contrast, AWS Graviton instances are built on the ARM64 architecture. In a Graviton-powered environment, one vCPU maps directly to one physical core. This design provides more consistent performance for multi-threaded workloads because there is no contention for core resources between threads, ensuring that your applications run more predictably when traffic spikes.
Performance benchmarks: Graviton vs. Intel vs. AMD
When you evaluate these processor families, you will find that the best chip depends entirely on your specific workload. Graviton2 and Graviton3 instances currently serve as the price-performance leaders, offering 40% better price-performance than Intel C5 instances and 23% better than AMD C5a instances when CPU resources are fully utilized. The gains are even more pronounced in the newest generations; the Graviton5 is approximately 11% faster than Graviton4, with some customer benchmarks showing real-world performance increases of up to 60% for specific heavy workloads.
However, Intel and AMD still hold distinct advantages in certain niches. For single-threaded speed, AMD C5a instances offer 14% better price-performance than Graviton2. Furthermore, Intel demonstrates a 5% to 45% advantage in MySQL read throughput compared to Graviton, particularly on larger instances with 48 to 64 vCPUs. This suggests that while Graviton is the general efficiency winner, specific query patterns or high-intensity single-threaded tasks may still warrant an x86 approach.
The cost-efficiency breakeven point
On a raw hourly basis, Graviton instances typically cost 20% less than equivalent Intel instances. The real financial impact, however, is dictated by how hard you push your hardware. Research indicates the breakeven point for Graviton is approximately 70% CPU utilization. Benefits become significantly more apparent above this threshold, making Graviton the clear winner for steady-state, high-demand applications like microservices and data processing.
If you are not yet ready to migrate to Graviton instances, AMD serves as an excellent middle ground. AMD instances are typically priced 5–10% cheaper than Intel while maintaining full x86 compatibility. This makes them a perfect “low-effort” optimization step for teams that need immediate savings without the architectural shift to ARM.
Choosing the right family for your workload
Databases (RDS and Aurora)
For MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MariaDB, migrating to Graviton is often the most impactful move you can make. Graviton3 delivers up to 30% lower compute costs for RDS compared to older x86 generations. While massive, read-heavy MySQL clusters might benefit from Intel’s throughput edge, the vast majority of standard relational database workloads will see immediate cost reductions with no change in user experience.
Containers and Kubernetes
Kubernetes environments are perfect candidates for Graviton adoption because EKS supports mixed-architecture clusters. This capability allows you to automate your EKS optimization by shifting modern, containerized microservices to Graviton while keeping legacy binaries on Intel nodes. This hybrid approach ensures you capture savings where possible without risking the stability of older codebases.
General compute
For web servers and application tiers running on Linux, Graviton provides 10-15% faster API response times even under moderate traffic. If your tech stack is built on modern interpreted languages like Java, Python, Node.js, or Go, the migration effort is usually minimal, often requiring little more than a simple instance type swap and an updated machine image.
Where x86 still wins
Despite the momentum behind Graviton, Intel and AMD remain necessary for specific scenarios where ARM is not yet a viable substitute. Windows Server workloads and proprietary x86-only binaries are not supported on Graviton, meaning legacy Windows-based applications must remain on traditional processors.
Additionally, if your application relies on specialized Intel instruction sets or older libraries that haven’t been recompiled for ARM64, the refactoring cost may outweigh the immediate compute savings. In these cases, staying on Intel or moving to AMD is the safer, more cost-effective path until the application can be modernized.
How Hykell automates your Graviton gains
Choosing the right instance type is only half the battle. To truly maximize efficiency, you must layer these architectural choices with a sophisticated AWS rate optimization strategy. Hykell helps you accelerate your Graviton gains by identifying exactly which workloads are ready for migration and which should remain on x86 for peak performance.
Our platform does more than just generate reports; it automates the heavy lifting. We stack Graviton’s native 20–40% price-performance advantage on top of optimized Savings Plans and Reserved Instances, ensuring you never pay for idle capacity. With Hykell, you can achieve a total AWS cost reduction of up to 40% on autopilot. We operate on a success-based model where we only take a slice of what you save – if we don’t find savings, you don’t pay.
Ready to see how much your Intel-heavy infrastructure is costing you? Book a free cost audit with Hykell today and start your transition to high-performance, low-cost compute.
