Plucky CPU maker beats AMD and Intel to become first to offer 320 cores per server — with even bigger models in the pipeline

By James On Sep 27, 2023

Oracle has rejected leading CPUs from the likes of AMD and Intel in favor of AmpereOne processors for use in its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) A2 Instances, which offer the highest core count in the industry.

The new OCI service, which has 320 bare metal cores and 156 flexible virtual machine (VM) cores, will be used to power general cloud workloads in 2024. These include running web servers, transcoding video, and maintaining CPU-based AI inference workloads.

At the same time, Oracle also announced two additional new services, including OCI compute bare metal instances, powered by Nvidia H100 GPUs, as well as OCI compute bare metal instances powered by Nvidia L40S GPUs.

A major coup for Ampere

“Oracle was the first cloud services provider to deploy Ampere processor-based compute instances worldwide,” said Jeff Wittich, Chief Product Officer at Ampere Computing. “These next-generation Ampere A2-based instances from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will deliver up to industry-leading 320 cores per instance for even greater performance, workload density and scalability.”

Having such a high core count can support both higher performance and VM density – and scale better to meet customer needs, Oracle said. They can also be implemented in flexible forms for VMs, giving them maximum resources and minimum costs.

Oracle has purchased $4.7 million worth of processors from Ampere, according to the company Serve the Housein addition to a $104.1 million upfront payment for future CPUs, which represents a big win for the company.

The super-dense chip was released in May 2023 and has up to 192 cores in a single chiplet. The dual-socket Arm-based AmpereOne CPUs that Oracle is purchasing offer 2MB/core, 8-channel DDR5, 128 Lanes PCIe Gen5, and power consumption is between 200W and 350W.

This news follows very shortly afterwards reports the same publication Google Cloud had agreed in August to use Ampere AmpereOne CPUs in its C3A compute instances.

Although providers including Microsoft have used Ampere Altra chips before, Google and Oracle have been the first to integrate their higher-end line of CPUs into a powerful cloud computing infrastructure.