Oracle unlocks power of Arm-based processors

To help customers and developers take advantage of Arm® technology, Oracle is providing tools, solutions, and support to fuel Arm-based application development. Oracle has also announced that its first Arm-based compute offering, OCI Ampere A1 Compute, is available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Now, customers can run cloud-native and general-purpose workloads on Arm-based instances with significant price-performance benefits. Oracle is the only major cloud provider offering Arm-based compute instances at only one cent per core hour, the industry’s lowest cost per core, with flexible VM sizing from 1 to 80 OCPUs and 1 to 64 GB of memory per core or as a bare-metal service with 160 cores and 1 TB of memory. Customers can now deploy Arm-optimised applications on containers, bare metal servers, and virtual machines in the Oracle public cloud, or Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer.

“We see increasing demand for server-side Arm computing and adding Arm-based compute instances to our extensive portfolio of offerings enables customers to pick and choose the right processors for their workloads,” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Now customers who need an Arm platform for development can get the flexibility, scalability, and price-performance they need. We’re also making it really easy for developers to move their apps and develop new ones on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.” 

“Ampere instances on OCI is a breakthrough for developers. Oracle’s Free Tier is a great offering that allows them to test the OCI Ampere A1 compute platform and experience the first-cloud native processor that delivers predictable performance, scalability and power needed,” said Renee James, founder, chairman and CEO, Ampere Computing. “The Oracle Cloud has all the tools developers need to try new technology, get excited about new platforms and develop new applications.” 

“The infrastructure industry has been bound to a one-size-fits-all approach to computing, but the next era of compute relies on secure and powerful purpose-built processing,” said Chris Bergey, SVP and GM, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm. “By bringing to market Arm-based OCI Ampere A1 Compute instances, Oracle is giving customers and developers a choice that is flexible and able to deliver a new level of price-performance to further enable innovation in the cloud.”  

New Arm Accelerator Program, Oracle Cloud Free Tier, and App Development Ecosystem 

Oracle is investing in the Arm ecosystem, providing developers with more choice in compute instances and superior price-performance compared to any other x86 instance on a per core basis. Three distinct offerings are available to developers to get started on OCI. With Oracle Cloud Free Tier, developers receive US$300 in free credits for 30 days. The Always Free Arm access gives developers four Ampere A1 cores and 24 GB memory – one of the industry’s most generous offerings. Lastly, with the newly launched Arm Accelerator program, open source developers, ISV partners, customers and universities with Arm-based development projects that need more resources beyond what the Oracle Cloud Free Tier provides, can apply to receive Oracle Cloud credits for a 12-month period. 

Oracle’s development stack is available on Ampere A1 instances, including Oracle Linux, Java, MySQL, GraalVM, and the Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) service. To make it easy for developers to get started, Oracle created an Oracle Linux Cloud Developer image which enables customers to install, configure, and launch a development environment that includes OCI client tools, utilities, and common programming languages such as Java, GraalVM, Python, PHP, Node.js, Go and C/C++. The developer image is easily accessible and can be deployed from the OCI console.

To help customers take advantage of the latest in Arm technology, Oracle is working closely with a wide variety of technology and open source partners, such as GitLab, Jenkins, Rancher, Datadog, OnSpecta, NGINX, and Genymobile. To help grow and enrich the Arm developer ecosystem, Oracle also announced that it is joining the Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), an open source, vendor-neutral community for sustaining the fastest growing CI/CD open source projects. 

New Ampere® Altra® Processor Running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Arm architectures are extremely efficient, scalable and flexible, making the processor suitable for everything from smartphones, IoT devices, PCs, automotive and industrial applications, to supercomputers and servers. From the edge to the cloud, customers can take advantage of Oracle’s range of compute options, its powerful bare metal servers and one of the industry’s first Arm-based flexible virtual machine shapes so they can right-size their workloads. Now customers can more precisely build their virtual machines to match workload requirements, so they can get the best performance while optimising costs. These compute shapes are truly general purpose and suitable for running a diverse set of compute-intensive workloads including: 

• General Purpose: The OCI Ampere A1 Compute provides superior price-performance for general purpose workloads, such as web servers, application servers and containers. These shapes offer balanced performance and an optimal price point for cloud-based scale-out workloads, such as NGINX and web applications.

• In-memory Caches and Databases: From databases to analytics, Arm processors deliver predictable performance for databases such as Redis and MySQL. Memory-heavy workloads and multithreaded applications such as in-memory databases and key-value stores, experience superior performance.

• Mobile Application Development: Ampere Altra’s high core count (up to 160) is ideal for the density and scale needed for mobile application development and testing. In addition, developing iOS or Android-based applications on the OCI Ampere A1 Compute eliminates the need for an emulator or nested virtualisation, leading to superior performance.

• Computationally-intensive and Scientific Applications: Arm processors provide the price-performance benefits that make it a commonly used platform for high-performance, compute-intensive and scientific applications such as AI/ML inferencing, media transcoding, and running HPC stacks like CFD, WRF, OPENFAM, GROMACS, BLAST, BeeGFS, and NAMD.

Powered by Ampere Altra processors, the OCI Ampere A1 Compute is the only flexible Arm-based virtual machine shape in the industry that can be customised based on memory and core requirements. It is one of the industry’s first penny-core server in the cloud at only $0.01 per core per hour and $0.0015 per GB of RAM per hour. Ampere’s choice of using a single threaded core, plus sustained 3.0Ghz maximum frequency, results in linear scaling with respect to the cores. This means performance-per-core scales well as the core count increases, helping ensure customers get exactly what they pay for. Ampere’s Altra processors can run all cores at the maximum frequency, ensuring that each A1 core offers predictable performance. In addition, the cores are completely isolated from the noisy neighbour impact of other workloads running on the same processor. Each core is single threaded by design with its own 64 KB L1 I-cache, 64 KB L1 D-cache and a huge one MB L2 D-cache. This helps ensure as much isolation as possible and guarantees predictable performance. The single threaded design also ensures that each thread has its own core and its own resources, eliminating the potential core sharing thread-security issues that have been demonstrated recently. The OCI Ampere A1 Compute shapes are available as both virtual machines up to 80 cores and bare metal instances up to 160 cores. 

In terms of benchmarks, when running x264 video encoding workloads on OCI Ampere A1, Oracle saw up to a 10 percent performance increase, and up to a 22 percent price-performance benefit compared to x86 based systems. For NGINX reverse proxy workloads on OCI Ampere A1, Oracle saw up to a 46 percent performance increase, and up to a 62 percent price-performance benefit compared to x86 based systems.