Today, we’re excited to announce the general availability of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Compute E6 Standard bare metal and flex virtual machine instances powered by the latest 5th Gen AMD EPYC™ Processors. OCI is among the first major cloud providers to offer general-purpose compute instances based on the latest AMD EPYC CPUs. E6 marks a significant leap forward in performance and value for our customers, delivering up to 2X the performance of E5 at the same price.

A New Standard in Performance

E6 Standard bare metal instances are engineered for high-throughput, compute-intensive workloads. Each instance comes with 256 cores, 3 TB of memory, and 200 Gbps networking throughput. That’s 33% more compute and memory and 2X the network bandwidth compared to E5 Standard, delivering up to 2X the performance on industry standard benchmarks.

At the core of E6 Standard is the 5th Gen AMD EPYC™ Processor, featuring:

  • Base frequency of 2.7 GHz (13% higher than previous generation)
  • Max Boost frequency of up to 4.1 GHz (11% higher than previous generation)
  • “Zen 5” architecture delivers up to 17% higher instructions per cycle (IPC) for integer heavy workloads

Compared to E5 Standard, E6 Standard delivers up to a 225% price-performance improvement for bare metal instances and up to 50% higher price-performance for virtual machines.

Figure 1: BM.Standard.E5.192 vs BM.Standard.E6.256. *SPECrate® is a registered trademark of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. For more information about SPEC CPU 2017, see www.spec.org/cpu2017
Figure 1: BM.Standard.E5.192 vs BM.Standard.E6.256
SPECrate® is a registered trademark
of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation
For more information about SPEC CPU 2017, see www.spec.org/cpu2017

 

Figure 2: VM.Standard.E6.Flex vs VM.Standard.E5.Flex virtual machine performance with 2OCPU 24GB Memory
Figure 2: VM.Standard.E6.Flex vs VM.Standard.E5.Flex 2 OCPU 24GB Memory

 

Figure 3: VM.Standard.E6.Flex vs VM.Standard.E5.Flex virtual machine performance with 8OCPU 96GB Memory
Figure 3: VM.Standard.E6.Flex vs VM.Standard.E5.Flex 8 OCPU 96GB Memory

 

Built for Demanding Workloads

E6 Standard includes 33% larger L3 cache (512 MB) and memory speeds of 6400MHz, which is 45% higher memory bandwidth than E5 Standard. Combined with AVX-512 full 512-bit data path for vector and floating-point operations, E6 Standard delivers outstanding performance on numerically intensive, memory-bound workloads.

Flexible Virtual Machines for Every Need

E6 Standard virtual machine instances offer unparalleled flexibility providing ability to choose from 1 to 126 OCPUs and 1 GB to 1,454 GB of memory. This level of granularity allows you to tailor your instance to fit any workload, whether you’re running a lightweight containerized app or a memory-heavy enterprise application.

Shape Type

Shape Name

OCPU*

Memory

Storage

Network

Bare Metal

BM.Standard.E6.256

256

3072 GB

2 x 960 GB NVMe

  Up to 1 PB of remote Block Storage  

200 Gbps

  Virtual Machine  

  VM.Standard.E6.Flex  

 1 – 126 

  1–64 GB per OCPU up to 1,454 GB  

Up to 1 PB of remote Block Storage

  1 – 99 Gbps  

*OCPU is a single CPU core and represents 2 threads (vCPUs)

Pricing That Redefines Value

E6 Standard instances are offered at the same price as E5 Standard instances:

  • $0.03 per OCPU-hour
  • $0.002 per GB-hour of memory

Ideal Use Cases for E6 Standard Instances

E6 Standard is ideal for running a wide range of applications, including:

  • Video transcoding, conferencing, on-demand video
  • Massively parallel batch jobs
  • In-memory databases and caching fleets
  • Backend servers for enterprise applications
  • Web and application servers
  • Gaming servers
  • App development environments
  • Big data processing (e.g. Spark, Hadoop)
  • Financial modeling and real-time analytics
  • High performance computing (HPC)
  • Scientific simulations and 3D rendering

In our workload testing, E6 Standard showed up to 2x per-core performance gains over E5 Standard, delivering the compute power you need without compromising on cost.

Figure 4: BM.Standard.E5.192 vs BM.Standard.E6.256.workload performance per core comparison.
Figure 4: BM.Standard.E5.192 vs BM.Standard.E6.256

Available Now

E6 Standard bare metal and virtual machine instances are available today across multiple US regions, with broader roll out planned over the coming months.

  • US East—Ashburn
  • US West—Phoenix
  • US Midwest—Chicago
  • Germany Central—Frankfurt
  • UK South—London

Conclusion

With E6 Standard, OCI combines high performance, massive scalability, and low costs to deliver industry-leading value. Whether you’re running web and application servers, video transcoding, cloud-native services, or general-purpose workloads, E6 Standard gives you the performance you need at the price you expect. Up to twice the performance at the same price. Unmatched value. Refer to our documentation for more details on E6 Standard bare metal and flexible virtual machine instances.

 

AMD, the AMD Arrow logo, EPYC, and combinations thereof are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.