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- 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 AmpereOne M silicon from Ampere Computing, available in virtualized and bare metal configurations.
The company recently divested from Ampere but continues to offer the chips to its 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 of x86 processors.
Virtual machines can run up to 45 OCPUs, equivalent to 90 cores, with 700 GB of memory.
The bare metal instances offer 48 OCPUs, 96 cores, 768 GB of DDR5 memory, and 3.84 TB of onboard storage.
Virtual and bare metal instances can use block storage and provide network bandwidth up to 100 Gbps.
Oracle claims that A4 instances deliver up to 35% higher core-to-core performance than A2 instances, citing a 20% higher clock speed and a 12-channel memory controller.
Previous generation A2 instances remain larger in scale, offering up to 78 OCPUs and 946 GB 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 unveiled a 192-core Graviton5 processor alongside Trainium3 AI accelerators, and Microsoft showed off its second-generation Cobalt processor with 132-core Arm Neoverse V3.
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, highlighting the move toward silicon neutrality.
“Oracle sold Ampere because we no longer believe it is strategic for us to continue to design, manufacture and use our own chips in our cloud data centers,” Larry Ellison said.
“We are now committed to a policy of chip neutrality in which we work closely with all of our CPU and GPU suppliers.”
This means Oracle will not rely exclusively on its own chips, allowing it to maintain flexibility across a diverse supply chain.
However, the company did not specify whether it will deploy future Ampere cores in OCI.
Via The register
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