Oracle isn't done with Ampere yet as A4 instances arrive on OCI boasting 96 cores

Oracle last week announced that it had divested from Ampere Computing. But while Big Red may no longer own part of the Arm CPU maker, it's not ready to stop using the chips just yet. On Monday, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the database giant's cloud wing, announced the availability of its A4 Standard instances based on Ampere Computing's AmpereOne M silicon in both virtualized and bare metal flavors. The chips can be had with up to 192 custom Arm cores on the open market. Unlike Amazon's Graviton or Microsoft's Cobalt, these aren't OCI exclusive. For OCI, Oracle has opted for a 96-core version of the chip clocked at 3.6 GHz with 192 MB and 64 MB of L2 and L3 cache, respectively, and 12 channels of DDR5 5600MT/s memory. Those cores are offered to customers in pairs of what Oracle is calling OCPUs. Each OCPU is composed of two physical cores, similar to how CPU threads on x86 CPUs from AMD or Intel are typically made available to customers. The A4 instances will be available in VMs up to 45 OCPUs (90 cores) and 700 GB of system memory or as a bare metal offering with 48 OCPUs (96 cores) and 768 GB of DDR5 and 3.84 TB of onboard storage. Both instances can be had with block storage and up to 100 Gbps of network bandwidth. Compared to its prior-gen A2 instances, which are based on Ampere's older AmpereOne (non-M) chips, Oracle claims customers can expect up to 35 percent higher core-for-core performance, thanks in part to a 20 percent higher clock speed and the higher memory bandwidth afforded by the 12 channel controller. With that said, Oracle's A2 instances are still larger with up to 78 OCPUs (virtualized) and 946 GB of DDR5 memory. OCI A4 instances are available at $0.0138 per OCPU per hour and $0.0027 per GB per hour. Whether we'll continue to see next-gen Ampere cores deployed in OCI going forward isn't clear. Last week, Oracle CTO and founder Larry Ellison said his company had sold its stake in the chip-maker in order to prioritize silicon neutrality. "Oracle sold Ampere because we no longer think it is strategic for us to continue designing, manufacturing and using our own chips in our cloud datacenters," he said. "We are now committed to a policy of chip neutrality where we work closely with all our CPU and GPU suppliers." The Register has reached out to Oracle and Ampere Computing for comment; we'll let you know if we hear back. Qualcomm takes RISC on Arm alternative with Ventana acquisition Amazon's Trainium3 is the latest to conform to Nvidia's mold Amazon keeps the pressure on Intel, AMD with 192-core Graviton5 CPU HPC won't be an x86 monoculture forever – and it's starting to show While Oracle may be committed to silicon neutrality, the same can't be said of Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. Earlier this month, Amazon revealed its third-generation Trainium AI accelerators, alongside a 192-core Graviton5 CPU. Meanwhile, in November, Microsoft showed off its second-gen Cobalt CPU with 132 Arm Neoverse V3 cores, while Google announced the general availability of its Ironwood TPU v7 accelerators, which boast performance on par with Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs. ®