- 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, 768 GB of memory, and 3.84 TB of storage.
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has introduced A4 Standard instances powered by Ampere Computing’s AmpereOne M silicon, available in virtualized and bare metal configurations.
The company recently divested Ampere, but continues to offer the chips to customers.
Each chip can provide up to 192 custom Arm cores, and Oracle sells these instances outside of its own 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 in 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 onboard storage.
Both virtual and bare metal instances can use block storage and offer network bandwidth of up to 100 Gbps.
Oracle claims that A4 instances provide up to 35% more core-by-core performance compared to A2 instances, citing a 20% higher clock speed and a 12-channel memory controller.
Previous generation A2 instances remain larger scale, offering up to 78 OCPUs and 946GB of DDR5 memory.
A4 instances are priced at $0.0138 per OCPU per hour and $0.0027 per GB per hour.
Other cloud providers continue to develop proprietary Arm solutions, as Amazon revealed a 192-core Graviton5 CPU along with Trainium3 AI accelerators, and Microsoft unveiled 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 implementations remain tied to their respective cloud hosting platforms.
Oracle CTO and founder Larry Ellison also confirmed the sale of the company’s stake in Ampere Computing, emphasizing a shift toward silicon neutrality.
“Oracle sold Ampere because we no longer believe 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 chip neutrality policy where we work closely with all of our CPU and GPU suppliers.”
This means that Oracle will not rely exclusively on its own chips, allowing it to maintain flexibility in a diverse supply chain.
However, the company has not clarified whether it will deploy future Ampere cores in OCI.
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