This month marks a new chapter in the evolution of the cloud. Since the inception of the company three years ago, Ampere has been steadfastly working to deliver the world’s first cloud native processor. Today, our journey took a pivotal turn. We’re excited to partner with Oracle to launch the world’s first Ampere enabled platform available en masse to the public on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

Over the past year, cloud service providers and users have been busy evaluating and qualifying Ampere^® Altra^® based servers to leverage Ampere’s core strengths of high-performance, predictability, and scalability. Combining these attributes with Oracle’s infrastructure investment delivers a substantial lift to modern cloud native applications running every day in OCI.

OCI and Ampere are delivering a high-capacity cloud offering based on the Ampere Altra processor that brings all these features at the best price/performance in the industry. This truly is the next step forward in cloud computing!

For Ampere, bringing this innovative new processor architecture to the cloud infrastructure market is the next step in changing how cloud customers worldwide build the next generation of cloud native applications.

Offering Customers Choice & Easy Access

Delivering diversity and choice to an industry that has been homogenous for a very long time is another key differentiator of the new OCI’s Ampere A1 Compute platform. With the Ampere Altra processor, built on the Arm ISA, Oracle now delivers this new innovative architecture to market at a time when the overall ecosystem is changing.

By offering the Ampere A1 Compute instances, OCI now brings a truly differentiated product offering to the market that both competes with, and in some cases beats x86 workload performance benchmarks (see our Performance Blog Series), while providing extremely economical value that leads the industry.

Oracle customers can also experiment with or test-drive their workloads on a truly differentiated compute product by taking advantage of the Oracle Free Tier and Always Free programs. These programs are designed to give prospective customers a full experience of what the Ampere A1 Compute offers. Whether they are prototyping a workload, verifying benchmarks or taking advantage of the convenient pre-built application examples, the OCI Free Tier allows easy access to Ampere A1 Compute cloud native computing. Furthermore, the Always Free program is based on a very generous shape of 4 Cores and 24GB of DRAM giving customers plenty of room to try things out or even get things done!

Predictability Without the Premium

Cloud computing consumers need Predictable Performance for the most demanding applications in the cloud today. The OCI Ampere A1 Compute platform is built on Ampere’s foundational design principles of single-threaded cores and consistent operational frequency under heavy load. These features, as well as other elements of the Ampere Altra architecture, combine to deliver the most predictable and consistent performance in the server processor industry. The OCI Ampere A1 Compute platform can be easily provisioned to meet a wide variety of compute requirements from the smallest fractional workloads to the largest clusters without the fear of co-resident workloads affecting the performance of fractional jobs or of other load based behavioral anomalies occurring.

Predictable performance is fundamental to delivering a consistent user experience. Some would think this comes at a premium given that traditional architectures would typically overprovision an infrastructure to maintain demanding SLAs. However, Oracle has made sure that this value is intrinsic to the Ampere A1 Compute platform by offering a penny/core pricing.

Reliable and Consistent Service When You Need It

Linear scalability – whether at the core, server or rack level – allows consumers of cloud computing to reliably meet the needs of a world with variable demands. OCI and Ampere have collaborated to offer a new set of compute shapes that offer easy incremental value to any cloud native consumer. From A1.Flex VM shapes to full 160-core bare metal monster shapes, the new OCI Ampere A1 Compute is built to scale with workload needs and deliver near linear performance each step of the way. Customers of the new OCI shapes can rest easy with the peace of mind that they are getting what they paid for with each workload by utilizing the OCI Ampere A1 Flex VM Shapes to precisely size their instance from 1-80 cores and 1-64GB of memory per core. Importantly, there is also no stranded capacity or oversold performance that comes from vCPUs based on hyperthreaded cores using SMT or from inefficient shape sizing on the OCI platform.

Consumers building distributed applications will find no better resource in the cloud than the OCI Ampere A1 Compute platform. Oracle’s approach to scale-out infrastructure across compute, network and storage, along with the near linear performance of the Ampere Altra processors gives consumers a ready network of very consistent right-sized shapes to build for the most demanding SaaS, serverless and distributed computing workloads that will scale with customer demand.

Broad Software Support Is Here

Developing applications for the Arm ISA has gone through a high growth stage in recent years. From operating systems to hypervisors to the entire application stack, the Arm ISA is now a first-class citizen for the majority of open-source code. Ampere and Oracle are collaborating with a mature software ecosystem, ready for cloud-native workloads to run blazingly fast on Arm-based processors. You can find out more about the growing list of software, OS, libraries, compilers and overall diversity of applications that are running today on Ampere Altra under continuous regression on our Solutions Portal.

This Solutions Portal also provides links, resources, and quick reference information on a wide variety of software and solutions that are not only running, but running better, than x86 on the Ampere Altra platform.

Get Started Today

This first instance of Ampere architecture has proven performance as demonstrated by third party benchmarks on the platform with many more coming soon. OCI customers can rely on the new Ampere A1 platform to deliver very consistent and cost-effective service based on very competitive pricing vs industry comparable products. Finally, we are extremely excited that OCI has built evaluation options like the Arm Accelerator program for developers and the Free Tier programs . These allow a wide variety of early access and developer cycles for prototyping and accelerating workload placement on this truly unique platform. You can find out more information or get started on OCI Ampere A1 Compute from these links:

• Getting started on Ampere A1 Compute Platform
• OCI Blog: Arm-based Cloud Computing Is the Next Big Thing: Introducing Ampere on OCI.
• Performance blog: Arm-based OCI Ampere A1 Compute instances beat the latest competition on NGINX.
• Performance blog: OCI Ampere A1 Compute instances can significantly reduce video encoding costs versus modern CPUs.