AMD’s 2nd Gen Epyc processors can now be found on the Oracle Cloud.

The performance characteristics of Oracle Cloud E3 makes it well suited for both general-purpose and high bandwidth workloads such as big data analytics, memory intense workloads, and Oracle business applications, says Oracle.

Oracle E3 instance

Released in the second half of last year and codenamed "Rome," AMD’s 2nd Gen Epyc server chip is based on 7nm process technology with up to 64 cores with 128 threads. It represents the next phase of AMD’s attempt to finally wrestle server market share away from rival Intel.

The E3 cloud instance is based on the AMD Epyc 7742 processor, with a base clock frequency of 2.25GHz and max boost of up to 3.4GHz. The E3 bare metal instance supports up to 128 cores, 2TB of RAM, and has 100Gbps of total network bandwidth.

When pitted against its Intel Xeon X7 offering, Oracle says the AMD E3 delivers a 185 percent increase in integer performance, a 158 percent increase in floating point performance, and a 136 percent increase in STREAM Triad bandwidth - the latter being a synthetic benchmark designed to measure sustainable memory bandwidth.

According to Rajan Panchapakesan, a senior principal product leader at Oracle, customers that deploy E3 VM instances can now specify up to 16GB of memory per OCPU, or Oracle Compute Unit - Oracle speak for a physical processor core, and have the ability to select an arbitrary number of OCPUs for a virtual machine.

For a 1-OCPU instance with 16 GB of RAM, the E3 instance is priced at 23 percent less than a similarly configured X7 Standard instance. And compared to the older E2 instances based on first-gen Epyc processors, it offers twice the floating-point throughput per cycle, twice the L3 cache per core, and lower memory latency, Panchapakesan says.