• New Oracle A4 instances use AmpereOne M silicon in virtualized and bare metal configurations
• Virtual machines run up to 45 OCPUs, equivalent to 90 cores
• Bare metal instances provide 48 OCPUs, 96 cores, 768GB memory, and 3.84TB storage

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has introduced A4 Standard instances powered by Ampere Computing’s AmpereOne M silicon, available in both virtualized and bare metal configurations.

The company recently divested from Ampere but continues to offer the chips to customers.

Each chip can provide up to 192 custom Arm cores, and Oracle is selling these instances outside its own cloud, unlike Amazon Graviton or Microsoft Cobalt processors.

Configurations and specifications

Each AmpereOne M core pair forms an Oracle CPU unit, or OCPU, similar to CPU threads on x86 processors.

Virtual machines can run up to 45 OCPUs, equivalent to 90 cores, with 700GB of memory.

The bare metal instances offer 48 OCPUs, 96 cores, 768GB of DDR5 memory, and 3.84TB of onboard storage.

Both virtual and bare metal instances can use block storage and deliver network bandwidth up to 100Gbps.

Oracle claims the A4 instances provide up to 35% higher core-for-core performance compared with A2 instances, citing a 20% higher clock speed and a 12-channel memory controller.

The prior-generation A2 instances remain larger in scale, offering up to 78 OCPUs and 946GB of DDR5 memory.

Pricing for A4 instances is $0.0138 per OCPU per hour and $0.0027 per GB per hour.

Other cloud providers continue to develop proprietary Arm solutions, as Amazon has revealed a 192-core Graviton5 CPU alongside Trainium3 AI accelerators, and Microsoft has introduced its second-generation Cobalt CPU with 132 Arm Neoverse V3 cores.

Google offers Ironwood TPU v7 accelerators, claiming performance comparable to Nvidia Blackwell GPUs.

Unlike Oracle, these deployments remain tied to their respective cloud hosting platforms.

Oracle CTO and founder Larry Ellison also confirmed the company’s sale of its stake in Ampere Computing, emphasizing a shift toward 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 data centers,” said Larry Ellison.

“We are now committed to a policy of chip neutrality where we work closely with all our CPU and GPU suppliers.”

This means that Oracle will not rely exclusively on its own chips, allowing it to maintain flexibility across a diverse supply chain.

However, the company has not clarified whether it will deploy future Ampere cores in OCI.

Via The Register

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