Comparing AWS Lambda ARM64 vs. x86_64 Performance Across Multiple Runtimes- 2025
16 hours ago
- #AWS Lambda
- #Serverless Computing
- #Performance Benchmark
- AWS Lambda arm64 (Graviton processors) generally offers better or equal performance compared to x86_64 at a 20% lower cost.
- Rust on arm64 is the most performant and cost-efficient combination, being up to 8x faster than Node.js and 2x faster than Python for CPU-intensive tasks.
- Python 3.11 on arm64 slightly outperforms newer Python versions (3.12, 3.13, 3.14) by 9-15% in benchmarks.
- Node.js 22 on arm64 is consistently faster than Node.js 20 on x86_64, offering a free ~15-20% speedup by switching architectures.
- Arm64 delivers 30–40% lower compute costs with equal or better performance than x86_64 across most workloads.
- Cold starts are 13-24% faster on arm64, with Rust being the fastest (16ms init time).
- For I/O-bound workloads, runtime differences diminish, making cost optimization more critical than raw performance.
- The benchmark is open-source and available on GitHub, allowing others to replicate or adapt the tests.