Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Announces OCI Compute Instances Based on New 4th Generation AMD EPYC Processors

To make it easier for organizations to balance price and performance in their cloud environments and reduce costs, Oracle today announced plans to make available new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Compute E5 instances with 4th generation AMD EPYC? processors. Unlike other cloud providers’ rigid instance options that bind organizations to paying more for unused computing resources, flexible instances from OCI allow customers to allocate cores and memory as needed.

Oracle offers standard, high-performance computing (HPC), and Dense-IO instances with choices for the number of cores, amount of memory, local and remote storage, networking, and other resources to serve a wide variety of workloads faster and more efficiently. These instances offer customers flexible and simple options to run a wide range of workloads in the cloud including applications from Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, and other third-party ISVs, as well as VMware and Kubernetes environments.

OCI Compute E5 instances will offer more CPU cores, better performance per core, better memory bandwidth, and higher storage capacity than previous iterations with customizable options including:

• OCI Compute E5 Standard instances are the preferred platform for web and application servers, back-end servers for enterprise applications, application development environments, and many other use cases. Compared to prior generation E4 instances, the new instances deliver great efficiency by offering 33 percent better performance per core and 50 percent better memory bandwidth, as well as 50 percent more cores on bare metal instances according to internal testing.
• OCI Compute E5 HPC instances bring powerful, cost-effective computing capabilities to complex mathematical and scientific problems across industries. By using cluster networking to combine the processing power of multiple HPC instances, organizations can tackle complex tasks that usually require a supercomputer—including training AI models, predicting the weather, and analyzing genetic sequences—in the cloud. The new instances offer 40 percent better price-performance than prior generation HPC instances according to internal testing.
• OCI Compute E5 Dense-IO instances are designed for large databases, big data workloads, and applications that require high-performance local storage. The new instances help organizations to better address workloads such as databases and file systems by offering 50 percent higher storage capacity and 63 percent higher storage performance than prior E4 Dense-IO instances according to internal testing.

OCI also enables customers to customize their deployments to suit their needs with specific capabilities such as burstable and preemptible instances. This helps customers control their computing resources and costs by scaling up rapidly or allowing their resources to be reclaimed for use elsewhere when demands fluctuate. For organizations running extra-sensitive workloads, shielded instances offer hardened firmware security on both bare metal and VMs to defend against malicious boot-level software. Lastly, confidential computing instances can also help prevent unauthorized access, while still delivering high performance, by encrypting and isolating data in use.

In addition to typical uses for cloud-based computing services, OCI Compute E5 instances can be configured with clustered file systems to tackle complex cases. These include cases with large databases or requirements to access and change data rapidly such as training AI models, conducting financial analysis, rendering video, or simulating car crashes.

OCI Compute E5 instances support multiple operating systems including Oracle Linux, Windows, and Red Hat among others, as well as hundreds of installable images from the Oracle Marketplace. Oracle plans to make OCI Compute E5 instances generally available during the second half of 2023.