Oracle tapped AMD’s EPYC 3 processors to power its latest VMware Cloud-backed instances. The company’s E4 Dense bare-metal compute instances provide customers with memory dense, high-core-count instances designed to power large artificial intelligence and real-time transactional processing applications.
“One size doesn’t fit all. Some applications require more compute processing, while others need more memory for real-time transaction processing,” wrote Sheryl Sage, senior principal product manager at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, in a recent blog post.
According to Sage, E4 Dense instances enable customers to tailor their cloud deployments to their specific application requirements. The instances can be configured with 32, 64, or 128-cores clocked at between 2.5-3.5 gigahertz (GHz), up to 2 terabytes of system memory, 100 gigabits per second (Gb/s) of network bandwidth, and up to 54.4 terabytes of NVMe storage.
The instances also support AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) security feature for confidential computing environments. The technology is natively supported in VMware's vSphere platform.
“With E4 Dense, we’re expanding EPYC into the hybrid cloud environment for our customers that need flexibility for size, storage, and memory performance for VMware solutions,” Bev Crair, SVP of compute at Oracle, said.
The instances are designed specifically to work with VMware’s Cloud Solution to support hybrid-cloud deployments. Announced in late 2019, the service allows customers to migrate workloads between their on-premises data centers and Oracle’s public cloud.
Sage expects the service will open the door for enterprises to migrate larger, computationally intense workloads – like databases and enterprise applications that benefit from high core counts – to OCI.
Oracle Cloud grows more diverse
This week's announcement underscores the diverse array of processor architectures on which OCI runs as well as the rapid rise of AMD's EPYC data center chips. According to a recent Gartner report, AMD saw the strongest gains of any chipmaker in 2021, with revenues surging 68.6%.
In addition to AMD, Oracle also deploys a range of Intel Ice Lake Xeon Scalable, Ampere Altra CPUs, and Nvidia A100 GPUs.
The approach is intended to meet customers where they’re at in their migration journeys rather than competing with the likes of Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure in the services arena.
One of the ways it has differentiated itself is by offering large, bare-metal instances and clusters. Today’s announcement is only the latest example of this philosophy. The company’s HPC-centric X7 instances, for example, can scale to more than 512 GPUs.
The cloud provider was also one of the first to adopt up-and-coming Arm CPU vendor Ampere’s Altra series processors, which pack 80-128 cores into a single package. The chips power Oracle’s lowest-cost instances with pricing starting at just a penny per core per hour.
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