Oracle is launching a brand new ARM-based offering in its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The A4 Standard instances are built around AmpereOne M chips and deliver up to 96 compute cores.

Oracle is expanding its range of ARM-based compute instances on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with the introduction of A4 Standard. The new offering is based on the AmpereOne M processor from Ampere and offers more computing power and memory capacity than the previous A1 and A2 variants.

96 cores

The A4 Standard instances are available as Virtual Machines (FlexVMs) and Bare Metal instances. They use Ampere’s AmpereOne M chip, which delivers 48 so-called OCPUs. One OCPU accounts for two AmereOne M cores, so the chip delivers 96 cores in total. The CPU delivers a 20 percent higher clock speed than its predecessors. Oracle states that the A4 Standard instances are therefore suitable for real-time analytics, data-intensive applications and AI inference, among other things.

Oracle also claims a doubling of memory bandwidth, thanks to 50 percent more memory channels running at 40 percent higher speeds. This should mainly benefit memory-sensitive applications such as in-memory databases and LLM inference.

The A4 Standard instances have a price tag of $0.0138 per OCPU hour and $0.0027 per GB hour of memory. The FlexVM variant offers up to 45 OCPUs and 700 GB of memory, while the Bare Metal version contains 48 OCPUs, 768 GB of memory and 3.84 TB of storage. Both solutions support network speeds up to 100 Gbps.

Better performance according to (own) benchmarks

According to Oracle, customers switching from A2-based virtual machines can expect a performance improvement of up to 35 percent per core. For compute-intensive workloads, the company reports up to 34 percent better SPECfp scores and 24 percent higher SPECint results. According to Oracle, memory-intensive applications see up to 35 percent higher memory throughput, while an improvement of up to 34 percent in SPECjbb is mentioned for latency-sensitive applications.

Transactional applications also benefit, with up to 35 percent higher LLAMA TPS results. Customers using bare-metal A1 Standard instances should notice similar performance improvements due to the higher clock speed, larger caches, and better memory access of the A4 instances.

Rise of ARM

With the announcement, Oracle is once again illustrating the role of the ARM architecture in the cloud ecosystem. Since AWS kicked things off with the first Graviton chip and demonstrated the benefits of ARM in a cloud environment, the architecture has grown into a fully-fledged and mature option for cloud native workloads. The high efficiency and therefore typically lower price than equivalent x86 systems compensate for any compatibility issues.