Ampere A1 Compute

Leading price-performance

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers Ampere Altra processors with an industry-leading 80 cores per CPU, with all cores capable of running at the maximum frequency of 3.0 Ghz consistently. Each core comes with its own 64 KB L1 I-cache, 64 KB L1 D-cache, and a huge 1 MB L2 D-cache, and delivers predictable performance.

Combined with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s high-performance cloud architecture, Ampere’s Altra processor delivers the best price-performance in the cloud.

Ampere A1 compute shapes are available in both bare metal with 160 cores and flexible VMs with up to 80 cores at a penny a core pricing, with cores billed at $0.01 per OCPU-hour and memory billed at $0.0015 per GB-hour in all regions.

Flexible cores and memory

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offers customers the option of Arm-based compute in three offerings: powerful bare metal servers with most Arm cores available today, flexible VM shapes for precisely right-sizing your workloads, and Dedicated Region Cloud @Customer for customers who have demanding latency or data locality requirements.

Our uniquely flexible VM shapes scale from 1-80 cores and 1-64 GB of memory per core. Now you can select the specific number of cores and the amount of memory when creating or resizing your VM. This flexibility lets you build VMs that better match your workload requirements, so that you can get the best performance while optimizing on cost.

Enhanced security

Ampere A1 compute platform is powered by Altra Arm processors. Each core of Altra processor is single-threaded and has its own resources. By running one thread per core, there is no sharing of the execution engine, registers, and L1/L2 cache between threads, which minimizes the attack surface for exploits. This eliminates the potential core- sharing, thread-security issues that have occurred recently and enhances the security posture of the processor.

Coupled with the security built-in the Altra processors, Oracle Cloud’s security-first approach spans across compute, network, and storage. It’s complemented by essential security services to provide the required levels of security for your most business-critical workloads.

Linear scalability and predictable performance

System performance is critical to cloud workloads. Ampere’s Altra processor is designed to deliver predictable performance at the scale needed for the cloud. Ampere Altra processor’s single-threaded core ensures that there is no contention for a core’s resources. These Arm-based CPUs do not rely on turbo core frequencies to deliver much higher performance per thread for specific workloads under the right circumstances. For cloud workloads this means predictable performance with sustained 3.0Ghz max frequency. Now cloud customers will get exactly what they pay for.

Altra’s single threaded core and cache design also ensures that performance scales nearly linearly as you increase the number of cores. This especially benefits processor intensive workloads like media encoding, encryption, AI inferencing and certain HPC workloads.

Rich developer ecosystem

Oracle works closely with an array of technology and open-source partners to enable our customers to gain access to the latest technology and in-depth expertise of the partner ecosystem. For customers to take advantage of the latest in Arm technology, Oracle brings forth ISV developer tools, open source organizations such as GitLab, Jenkins, Docker, and technology partners such as Arm to support our customers to build and run server-side Arm-based solutions fast and port existing applications seamlessly. Oracle offers Arm ports for Oracle Linux, Java, and MySQL to jumpstart your development on A1 compute platform.

Compute choices for all your workloads

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides several compute options: You can create bare metal instances, VMs, containers, or run serverless functions using Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and Ampere CPU/GPU architectures. With the addition of Ampere Altra Arm 64 bit CPUs, customers get additional choice and diversity to run their workloads. Customers can deploy applications on containers, bare metal servers, and VMs in the Oracle public cloud or Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer. OCI’s Dedicated Region Cloud@Customer is ideal for customers who want the power of the cloud and the performance of Ampere A1 bare metal and VM shapes in their own data center.

Choice of operating systems and runtimes

The A1 compute platform supports commonly used Linux distributions such as Oracle Linux, and Ubuntu. All these images are easily accessible and can be deployed from the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure console. The Oracle Linux Developer image for A1 platform includes runtime languages support for Java, Python, PHP, Node.js, Go, and C/C++. The developer image enables you to install, configure and launch a development environment that includes common programming languages and OCI client tools and utilities.