Oracle announces OCI Ampere A1 Compute Arm-based computing for modern apps

Cloud major Oracle has announced its first Arm-based compute offering called OCI Ampere A1 Compute that will be available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) at only one cent per core hour, the industry’s lowest cost per core.

The offering means that customers can run cloud-native and general-purpose workloads on Arm instances with significant price-performance benefits.

“The increasingly distributed nature of work means modern applications don’t just live in the Cloud, it lives at the edge. In the Asia Pacific, this is being driven by smart industry-edge applications, real-time analytics, and IoT, as businesses seek to improve operations and deliver new experiences to their customers,” said Chris Chelliah, SVP, Technology and Customer Strategy, Asia Pacific and Japan.

These applications need infrastructure that is open, extremely efficient, scalable and secure. 

“This is what ARM architectures deliver and with the price performance on offer we expect to see rapid uptake in the region,” Chelliah said in a statement late on Tuesday.

Oracle is investing in the Arm ecosystem, providing developers with more choice in compute instances and the best price-performance, compared to any other x86 instance on a per core basis.

“Ampere instances on OCI is a breakthrough for developers. Oracle’s Free Tier is a great offering that allows them to test the OCI Ampere A1 compute platform and experience the first-cloud native processor that delivers predictable performance, scalability and power needed,” said Renee James, founder, chairman and CEO, Ampere Computing.

In terms of benchmarks, when running x264 video encoding workloads on OCI Ampere A1, Oracle saw up to a 10 percent performance increase, and up to a 22 percent price-performance benefit compared to x86 based systems.