Ampere AmpereOne Wins Big at Oracle Cloud A2

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Ampere AmpereOne A160 30 At Computex 2023 1
Ampere AmpereOne A160 30 At Computex 2023 1

This week Oracle Cloud World happened while STH was at Intel Innovation. Still, by the end of the week, some big news came out. Oracle purchased $4.7M of processors and has a $104.1M prepayment for future processors via its latest proxy statement. This is a solid win for the AmpereOne product line.

Ampere AmpereOne Wins Big at Oracle Cloud A2

OCI has a new instance type with AmpereOne. The new OCI Compute A2 instances will offer up to 156 cores. In addition, Oracle says the bare-metal core count will be up to 320 cores. That seems to imply that Oracle is deploying at least 160 core AmpereOne CPUs in its cloud.

Ampere Altra To AmpereOne Products
Ampere Altra To AmpereOne Products

Generally, Oracle offers fewer cores on some of its virtualized instances due to overheads, so that is likely the difference between 156 and 320. Another important note is that Oracle is deploying dual socket AmpereOne. Many of the deployments we have seen of Arm server processors thus far are with single socket nodes. A single socket tends to be popular since it alleviates the socket-to-socket links. We are seeing single-socket servers become more popular on the x86 side as well as CPU core counts increase. On the other hand, single socket deployments necessarily limit how scalable a system is. If one compares this deployment to a 64-core and 128GB Graviton3 deployment, having 320 cores in a single server is a completely different class of infrastructure.

We do not have photos of Oracle’s new servers, but if you want to see an example, we looked at theĀ Supermicro Ampere AmpereOne Arm Servers that you can check out to see what the new chips look like.

Supermicro Ampere AmpereOne At Computex 2023 4
Supermicro Ampere AmpereOne At Computex 2023 4

Overall, the new instances should provide more performance per socket and more performance per core.

Final Words

This is a big win for Ampere after its Google Cloud C3A instance reveal. It shows that big customers are adopting its custom core which is good to see. AmpereOne is very different than the current AWS Graviton3 so it is neat to see the new core and CPU gain traction. At the same time, the x86 folks are not staying still.

Ampere AmpereOne A160 30 At Computex 2023 3
Ampere AmpereOne A160 30 At Computex 2023 3

Hopefully, we will get to review an AmpereOne server soon since they appear to be a big jump over Altra Max.

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