Oracle puts AMD EPYC in the Cloud
by Dr. Ian Cutress on October 23, 2018 2:00 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- AMD
- Enterprise
- Enterprise CPUs
- EPYC
- Cloud
- Oracle
The process of AMD ramping up its EPYC efforts involves a lot of ‘first-step’ vendor interaction. Having been a very minor player for so long, all the big guns are taking it slowly with AMD’s newest hardware in verifying whether it is suitable for their workloads and customers. The next company to tick that box is Oracle, who is announcing today that they will be putting bare metal EPYC instances available in its cloud offering.
The new E-series instances will start with Standard E2, costing around $0.03 per core per hour, up to 64 cores per server, Oracle is stating that this pricing structure is 66% less than the average per-core instance on the market. One bare metal standard instance, BM.Standard E2.52, will offer dual EPYC 7551 processors at 2.0 GHz, with 512 GB of DDR4, dual 25GbE networking, and up to 1PB of remote block storage. Another offering is the E2.64 instance, which will offer 16 cores by comparison.
As well as the bare metal offerings, VM shapes from one to eight cores are also available, essentially occupying up to one of the zeppelin dies per CPU. Oracle cites AMD’s ties with Hadoop as an ideal workload, such as Cloudera, Hortonworks, MapR, and Transwarp, as well as Oracle’s ties to HPC, such as weather modelling, computational fluid dynamics, simulation/crash analysis, and oil and gas exploration.
Rollout of the new EPYC instances will start with the US East-Ashburn region from today, rolling out to London by the end of the month and other US/Europe locations by the end of the year. No word on Asia.
Snapping up Oracle means that AMD has another cloud provider in its cap, alongside Microsoft and Baidu that were announced last year. AMD has stated that they are playing with most (if not all) of the big cloud players in the business, and it will take time for the various companies to deploy EPYC systems either for public or private customers. There are several eyes on the future of AMD’s portfolio, such as the next generation parts, but also the level of expansion this market is seeing recently with Intel unable to meet demand while still making processors at the same rate. AMD’s goal to regain market share and re-energize its bottom line will depend significantly on vendor relationships, such as this one with Oracle, and execution of its new products.
Related Reading
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- Cray Adds AMD EPYC Processors to CS500 Cluster Supercomputers
- More EPYC Servers: Dell Launches 1P and 2P PowerEdge for HPC and Virtualization
- Baidu Announces An EPYC Deployment: Single Socket Scorpio Systems
- Microsoft Announces Azure VMs with Dual 32-core AMD EPYC CPUs
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26 Comments
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PeachNCream - Tuesday, October 23, 2018 - link
That's some EPYC-ally good news for AMD.FredWebsters - Wednesday, December 26, 2018 - link
I think that these news are good too!HStewart - Tuesday, October 23, 2018 - link
Basically what this means is that it gives customers options to choose EPYC servers if they wish - it does not mean that Oracle is switching to EPYC has primary server. They still have SPARC and Xeon based serversTeckk - Tuesday, October 23, 2018 - link
It was nowhere mentioned that this replaces Xeons. Not sure why you're even mentioning it.Pewzor - Tuesday, October 23, 2018 - link
Probably being defensive, it's typical.Fact is Epyc is barely 2 years old, if Xeon is being replaced this early on, Intel will be sheeting their pants and tell their fanboy it's golden shower just take it in.
HStewart - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
Reading more out of the message - All I am saying is that EPYC is not replacing Zeon's that it just another platform for Oracle to have servers on - typical AMD fanboys love to think just because one supports Intel - that they must defend Intel. Who cares it just a CPU platform.Arbie - Tuesday, October 23, 2018 - link
I think the HStewart comment was a reasonable addition that might well have been in the article itself. Not sure why you're even complaining about it.Teckk - Tuesday, October 23, 2018 - link
When any company announces a new product, it will mention VERY CLEARLY if that replaces an existing one. It would have been mentioned in the article if it was necessary. Not all AMD articles need Intel in them and also the other way around.Must be hard to remain neutral and unbiased.
HStewart - Monday, October 29, 2018 - link
Did you notice, I did not mention only mention Zeon, I did mention SPARC - but no body cared about that point. Just assume bias for Intel.lilmoe - Tuesday, October 23, 2018 - link
It's reasonable for audiences like those found in other tech fangirl sites.What business in their right mind would immaturely faze out all of their Intel based infrastructure just because AMD offers "2.5x" more value? Their Intel based servers are paid for or in contract. These servers ain't going nowhere until the end of their life-cycles, or until they become unprofitable.
Unless Intel beats AMD in value (regardless which is "cheaper", that's not the full equation), you can expect more AMD and less Intel in the coming years. These don't need AVX for the vast majority of workloads.