- New Oracle A4 instances use AmpereOne M silicon in virtualized and bare metal configurations
- Virtual machines can handle up to 45 OCPUs, which corresponds to 90 cores
- Bare metal instances offer 48 OCPUs, 96 cores, 768 GB memory and 3.84 TB 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 Ampere, but continues to offer the chips to customers.
Each chip can store 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 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 700 GB of memory.
The bare metal instances offer 48 OCPUs, 96 cores, 768 GB of DDR5 memory, and 3.84 TB of internal storage.
Both virtual and bare metal instances can use block storage and provide network bandwidth up to 100 Gbps.
Oracle claims that the A4 instances offer up to 35% higher core-for-core performance compared to A2 instances, citing a 20% higher clock speed and a 12-channel memory controller.
The previous generation A2 instances remain larger in size, offering up to 78 OCPUs and 946 GB of DDR5 memory.
Pricing for A4 copies 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 unveiled a 192-core Graviton5 CPU alongside Trainium3 AI accelerators, and Microsoft introduced its second-generation Cobalt CPU with 132 Arm Neoverse V3 cores.
Google offers Ironwood TPU v7 accelerators and claims 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 to silicon neutrality.
“Oracle sold Ampere because we no longer believe it is strategic for us to continue to design, manufacture and operate our own chips in our cloud data centers,” said Larry Ellison.
“We are now committed to a policy of chip neutrality, working closely with all of 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 yet clarified whether it will deploy future Ampere cores in OCI.
Via The registry
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