New OCI Ampere A2 Compute instances powered by AmpereOne® deliver best in class price-per-performance.

Ampere and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) announced today the launch of second-generation Ampere-based compute instances, OCI Ampere A2 Compute, based on the AmpereOne® family of processors. The new offering builds upon the success of OCI Ampere A1 Compute instances, which have been adopted by OCI customers and deployed across over 100 OCI services, Oracle Database, and cloud based Fusion Applications.

OCI Ampere A2 Compute instances provide higher core count virtual machines and high-density containers within a single server, delivering more performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency for cloud native workloads. In addition, the OCI Ampere A2 Compute series further extends OCI’s lead in both Arm-based cloud computing and price-for-performance.

“OCI and Ampere began our collaboration with the ground-breaking A1 shapes. We’ve demonstrated the versatility of these shapes on a wide range of workloads from general purpose applications and OCI services to the most recently announced and highly demanding use case: Llama3 generative AI services,” said Jeff Wittich, Chief Product Officer at Ampere. “Building on this momentum, the new OCI Ampere A2 Compute shapes using our AmpereOne® processors are set to create a new baseline in price-performance for the cloud industry across an ever-expanding variety of cloud native workloads and instance types.”

Key features, pricing and performance metrics for the OCI Ampere A2 Compute instances include:

• Up to 78 OCPUs (1 OCPU = 2 AmpereOne® cores, 156 cores total)
• Up to 946 GB of DDR5 memory with 25% more bandwidth compared to A1
• Flexible VM sizes, with up to 946 GB of memory, and block storage boot volumes up to 32TB
• Networking bandwidth of up to 78 Gbps Ethernet and up to 24 VNICs
• Testing shows that our customers may see up to 2X better price performance vs comparable x86-based shapes
• Leadership Arm-based cloud compute pricing at $0.014/OCPU/hour, and $0.002/GB/hour
• Oracle’s Flex Shapes allow customers to tune the core count of their shape based on their actual workloads for even more savings

Like OCI Ampere A1 Compute instances, OCI Ampere A2 Compute instances show strong performance for multiple AI functions, including generative AI. This performance is made possible through joint development efforts between Ampere Computing and OCI that have recently delivered up to 152% performance gain over the previous upstream llama.cpp open-source implementation.

Beyond AI, OCI Ampere A1 and A2 Compute instances are also well-suited for other cloud native workloads, such as analytics and databases, media services, video streaming, and web services. They offer the linear scalability, low latency, density and predictable performance these workloads need, bringing more performance and higher cost savings. For example, when deploying a typical web service on OCI Ampere A2 Compute, using very popular applications such as MySQL, NGINX, Cassandra, and Redis, the savings can be very compelling. An enterprise spending $50M annually across a weighted blend of these popular web service components could save up to $21.4M in cloud infrastructure costs compared with OCI E5 x86 based shapes. The result can save up to 43% less in infrastructure costs, 30% reduction in power consumption, and 33% less carbon emissions.

OCI Ampere A1 and A2 Compute shapes represent a significant advancement in cloud computing by lowering general purpose cloud computing costs, addressing AI computing efficiency, providing a more predictable and linearly scalable compute resource, and helping companies achieve ESG goals faster. Visit the OCI Ampere Compute website to get started.

About Ampere

Ampere is a modern semiconductor company designing the future of cloud computing with the world's first Cloud Native Processors. Built for the sustainable Cloud with the highest performance and best performance per watt, Ampere processors accelerate the delivery of all cloud computing applications. Ampere Cloud Native Processors provide industry-leading cloud performance, power efficiency and scalability. For more information visit Ampere Computing.