Oracle has announced that it is launching the E4 platform based on third-generation AMD EPYC processors. The E4 platform includes both bare metal and flexible virtual machines (VMs). The announcement was made in an Oracle blog post by Rajan Panchapakesan, director of product management, OCI Compute.
“At Oracle OpenWorld 2018, we announced a strategic partnership with AMD and launched the Oracle E2 platform on the first generation of AMD EPYC processors,” said Panchapakesan. “Since that launch, we’ve deployed Oracle E2 Compute instances to all of our commercial regions. Eighteen months later, in April 2020, we built on this partnership and launched the E3 platform on the second generation. Many of our enterprise customers and Oracle Cloud applications are running general-purpose workloads on AMD EPYC processors.”
According to Panchapakesan, these E4 standard instances use 64 core processors, with a base clock frequency of 2.55 GHz and a max boost of up to 3.5 GHz. The bare metal E4 standard compute instance supports 128 OCPUs (128 cores and 256 threads) with 256MB of L3 cache, 2TB of RAM, and 100 Gbps of overall network bandwidth, resulting in the highest core count for a bare metal instance on any public cloud and memory bandwidth that is well-suited for both general-purpose and high-bandwidth workloads that require larger and faster memory.
Panchapakesan said Oracle customers have already successfully deployed AMD-based instances, including for the following use cases:
- Video conferencing
- Real-time video processing
- Massively parallel processing and high-performance computing (HPC)
- Business-critical applications
- Web and application servers
- Backend servers for enterprise applications
- Gaming servers
- In-memory database
- Caching fleets
- App development environments
According to Panchapakesan, key highlights include:
- E4 instances continue the flexible infrastructure approach that Oracle established with E3. You’re free to select the exact number of OCPUs and amount of memory that you need for a VM, not forced to choose from a fixed menu of 1, 2, 4, 8, or 16. You can launch any custom VM size that meets your needs, such as a 3-core, 6-core, or 63-core VM with anywhere from 1GB–1TB of memory.
- These custom sizes mean lower costs. E4 instances bill separately for the OCPU and memory resources provisioned. Each OCPU comes with its associated simultaneous multithreading unit and is priced at $0.025, and memory is priced at $0.0015 per gigabyte—the same prices as Oracle E3 Compute instances. An E4 instance with 1-OCPU instance and 16GB of RAM has a price of $0.049, which is 23% less than X7 Standard and 57%–61% less than comparable instances offered by other clouds.
- E4 instances support reboot resize, so you can easily migrate from your existing compute instances to an E4 instance of compatible shape.
To learn more about AMD EPYC cloud solutions for OCI, watch the video from Oracle VP Ross Brown. For more information on the E4 Standard and flexible instances, access Oracle’s documentation. And, for more Oracle Cloud Infrastructure solutions for AMD EPYC-powered Oracle Cloud instances, visit the AMD tech docs and white paper library.