- New Oracle A4 instances use AmpereOne M silicon in virtualized and bare metal configurations
- Virtual machines can handle up to 45 OCPUs, which equates to 90 cores
- Bare metal instances offer 48 OCPUs, 96 cores, 768 GB of memory and 3.84 TB of storage.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure introduced A4 Standard instances, based on AmpereComputing’s AmpereOne M silicon and available in virtualized and bare metal configurations.
The company has recently tied up with Ampere, but continues to offer chips to its customers.
Each chip can provide up to 192 custom Arm cores, and Oracle sells these instances outside the cloud, unlike Amazon Graviton or Microsoft Cobalt processors.
Configurations and specifications
Each pair of AmpereOne M cores forms an Oracle CPU Unit, or OCPU, similar to the CPU threads of x86 processors.
Virtual machines can run up to 45 OCPUs, equivalent to 90 cores, with 700 GB of memory.
Bare metal instances offer 48 OCPUs, 96 cores, 768 GB of DDR5 memory and 3.84 TB of internal storage.
Virtual and pure metal instances can take advantage of block storage and provide up to 100 Gbps of network bandwidth.
Oracle says A4 instances offer up to 35% better core-to-core performance than A2 instances, citing a 20% higher clock speed and a 12-channel memory controller.
The previous generation A2 instances are still larger, offering up to 78 OCPUs and 946GB of DDR5 memory.
A4 copies cost $0.0138 per OCPU per hour and $0.0027 per GB per hour.
Other cloud providers continue to develop their own Arm solutions, such as Amazon unveiling a 192-core Graviton5 processor along with Trainium3 AI accelerators and Microsoft unveiling its second-generation Cobalt processor with the 132-core Arm Neoverse V3.
Google offers Ironwood TPU v7 accelerators with performance comparable to Nvidia Blackwell GPUs.
Unlike Oracle, these distributions remain tied to their respective cloud hosting platforms.
Oracle CTO and founder Larry Ellison also confirmed the company’s sale of its shares in Ampere Computing and highlighted a move toward silicon neutrality.
“Oracle sold Ampere because we no longer believe it is strategic to continue to design, manufacture and operate our own chips in our cloud data centers,” said Larry Ellison.
“We have now committed to a policy of chip neutrality and work closely with all our CPU and GPU suppliers.”
This means that Oracle will not rely solely on its own chips, allowing it to maintain flexibility across a diverse supply chain.
However, the company has not specified whether it will use future Ampere cores in OCI.
IN the record
