Oracle adds Arm-powered servers with up to 160 cores to its cloud – must be why it sunk millions into Ampere

Oracle will add Arm-powered servers to its cloud and tout them as delivering "the best price-performance compared to any other x86 compute instance on a per core basis with an order of magnitude of cost savings." Ampere will provide its Altra processors for the servers, which may explain why Oracle sank $40m into the upstart …

[Bronek Kozicki]

Ampere, 160 cores, in the cloud?

Huh, suddenly Oracle cloud is looking interesting.

I am sure there's a trap somewhere. They cannot make it worse then pricing per core, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ampere, 160 cores, in the cloud?

"They cannot make it worse then pricing per core, right?"

Does Oracle moving all their cloud customers to Google in a few years count?

I mean when Oracle accept they can't keep pace with three large competitors by 5+ times as much per annum and rejects AWS and Azure they don't have many available options.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ampere, 160 cores, in the cloud?

RISC is 5x more efficient per core/cycle than CISC so....

[Pascal Monett]

Maybe, but what's the point if you're paying 5 times the cost in licensing ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Ampere, 160 cores, in the cloud?

> RISC is 5x more efficient per core/cycle than CISC

[citation needed]

[Aitor 1]

Re: Ampere, 160 cores, in the cloud?

Not only citation needed, also define risc and cisc. Both arm and x86 are quite complex now, but not in a way you can say they truly are cisc or risc.

[Dante Alighieri]

Costs

It was meant to be more a comment on Oracle's billing model than the architecture - I exaggerated RISC/CISC for effect, so apologies for upsetting the technically more competent than me regarding this.

I took the original post as what's the trap and suggested a possibility.

Mea Maxima Culpa

which icon is for self flagellation? gimp or..

[guyr]

workloads that can thrive on modest resources

"AMD is also playing nice with Oracle, with the chip slinger's Epyc Milan silicon on the way. Oracle plans to rent individual cores of the new processors to those running microservices and similar workloads that can thrive on modest resources."

This is an odd statement. AMD is presently outperforming all available Intel options by a wide margin. So why is Oracle targeting AMD cores only to workloads requiring modest resources?

[Boothy]

Re: workloads that can thrive on modest resources

Indeed.

Even in PC gaming, arguable the last bastion where Intel is slightly ahead of AMD in performance *[1], recent benchmarking with the new nVidia 3080 (fastest current desktop GPU, so good to show of CPU bottlenecks) shows the current top end desktop Intel i9-10900K is only about 1-2% faster on average than a Ryzen-9-3950X at 4k gaming, which rises to a 2-4% lead for Intel in 1440p. Your average gamer isn't going to notice 4%, let alone 1 or 2% difference in FPS.

Also Zen 3 is about to launch, with estimates this is better IPC and clock speed, so those few % of a lead for Intel, are very likely to become a lead for AMD instead. And more on topic, Zen 3 is coming to Epyc of course.

1. Intel is also a little faster with some Adobe apps like Photoshop, but that's an outlier, and seems to be mainly down to poor code optimisations by Adobe, that doesn't scale well with core count.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: workloads that can thrive on modest resources

> AMD is presently outperforming all available Intel options by a wide margin.

No, they are not. Not by a long shot. Not their chips and not their compiler either.

I understand you - and some other commentards here - have a personal dislike of Intel, and/or you are paid by AMD to pimp their kit on the Intertubes, but the assertion that AMD is outperforming all available Intel options by a wide margin is (a) patently false and (b) pure fantasy.

[Porco Rosso]

Re: workloads that can thrive on modest resources

Isn't it because AMD cannot supply enough CPU's at actual time point?

There production capacity isn't that big to supply demand ... so if true

its makes sense that Oracle and other big players are using AMD only for low volume service/ products

[Tim99]

Snark

..."an order of magnitude of cost savings" - It might be 2 orders of magnitude, but we do need to keep our margins up...