Oracle Cloud Infrastructure introduces AMD EPYC powered instances

Oracle on Tuesday announced the availability of AMD EPYC-powered instances on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Oracle says it's the largest public cloud provider to have bare metal instances on AMD EPYC processors.

The Compute Standard E2 platform -- the first addition to the AMD EPYC processor-based E series -- is generally available in Bare Metal as well as one, two, four and eight core VM Shapes.

At 3 cents per core hour, Oracle says it's the most cost-effective instance available on any public cloud. The EPYC platform also offers more than 269 Gb/s memory bandwidth, the highest recorded by any instance in the public cloud. Oracle also points out that EPYC processors aren't affected by Meltdown and Foreshadow security vulnerabilities.

EPYC-based instances are well-suited for general purpose workloads, Oracle says, as well as for Oracle applications including E-Business Suite, JD Edwards and PeopleSoft. They're also ideal for big data analytics workloads that rely on higher core counts and significant memory bandwidth. Within HPC, the higher memory bandwidth of the EPYC instance also makes it a solid fit for use cases around weather modeling, computational fluid dynamics, simulation and crash analysis in aviation and automotive manufacturing, and oil and gas exploration.

EPYC instances are generally available in OCI's US East-Ashburn region and will be generally available in London by the end of October. They'll be available in other US and European regions by the end of the year.