Ampere Computing's ARM-based datacenter processors become available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Ampere Computing, a chip startup founded by former Intel president Renee James, has secured its first major customer: Oracle Cloud. Oracle announced last week that it will begin offering Ampere-based compute instances, both virtual and bare metal, as a service early next year. The instances will support up to 160 cores with 3.3Ghz turbo frequency and will run Oracle Linux, Ubuntu, and other Linux distributions. Oracle said it will provide more details later this year and plans to offer value-added services such as managed Kubernetes.

Ampere's flagship product, the Ampere Altra chip, is the industry's first 80-core Arm server processor, unveiled in March. The company has positioned the chip as competitive with x86 processors from Intel and AMD on price, performance, scalability, security, and power efficiency. According to Karan Batta, VP of product management for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, the Arm-based compute offering will give Oracle's customers "diversity of choice in the form of a third platform in addition to Intel and AMD," while providing developers better price-performance over x86 compute instances.

Oracle's relationship with Ampere runs deep—the cloud provider invested $40 million in the startup last year, and Renee James sits on Oracle's board of directors. When Ampere unveiled the Altra chip in March, Oracle announced it was sampling the technology for OCI, as did Microsoft Azure. During an Oracle Live event last week, Ampere CEO James explained that the large base of Arm developers from the device ecosystem—phones, edge devices, and other emerging smart devices—positions developers well to leverage Arm-based servers. She noted that "what this allows is for developers to come to the OCI cloud and be able to either move their apps, develop new apps, and very quickly get to market with something that can serve to all of those devices and emerging opportunities." James also revealed that Ampere is working on a next-generation 128-core processor, which will be compatible with its 80-core processor.

This announcement represents a major validation for Arm in the data center. AWS has already built custom Arm-based Graviton and Graviton2 processors for its EC2 instances, and now Oracle joins Amazon in offering Arm instances. Kevin Krewell, a principal analyst with TIRIAS Research, noted that "it's a continual validation that the Arm server business is an important part of the cloud ecosystem." After ten years of development, the Arm server ecosystem—including operating systems and development environments—is now mature enough for Arm chipmakers to succeed in the $20 billion server chip market. The ecosystem's momentum was further boosted when Nvidia announced a deal two weeks ago to acquire Arm for $40 billion, which will likely accelerate Arm's expansion in the data center.

Oracle made several additional cloud announcements alongside its Ampere partnership. The company became the first major cloud provider to offer Nvidia A100 Tensor Core GPUs on bare-metal instances. Early next year, Oracle also plans to introduce HPC compute instances based on Intel's "Ice Lake" processors and new E4 instances using AMD's "Milan" processors. The company partnered with Rescale to pre-install its simulation platform on OCI, making it faster and easier for Oracle customers to deploy HPC workloads.