Available now: E5 instances on AMD EPYC processors for up to 2x better performance

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Compute E5 Standard bare metal and virtual machine (VM) instances based on 4th generation AMD EPYC Processors™ (Code-Named "Genoa").

Compared to the previous generation of E4 Standard bare metal instances with 128 OCPUs, the E5 Standard bare metal instances have 192 OCPUs (192 cores or 384 threads) with over 33%-better performance per core. E5 instances have a base clock frequency of 2.4 GHz and a max boost of up to 3.7 GHz, comparing to E4’s base frequency of 2.55 GHz and boost frequency of 3.5 GHz. The RAM in E5 Standard instances is upgraded to 2.25 TB DDR5 and 384 MB of L3 Cache from the 2 TB DDR4 and 256 MB of L3 Cache in the E4 platform. The memory bandwidth of E5 instances is twice that of E4 instances due to the increase from 8 memory channels to 12 memory channels and the upgrade from DDR4 to DDR5. The E5 VMs continue to support the flexible infrastructure approach that allows customers to select the exact number of cores needed from 1–94 OCPUs with anywhere from 1–1,049 GB of memory.

Table 1: E5 instances available at launch

OCPU refers to a single core and associates with 2 threads (vCPUs).

Similar to E4 instances, E5 instances bill separately for the OCPU and memory resources provisioned. Each OCPU is priced at US$0.030 per hour, and each GB memory is priced at US$0.002 per hour. Comparing to our current E4 Standard offerings, E5 provides 21%+ uplift in price performance.

Table 2: System configuration of E4 and E5

E5 instances support reboot resizing, so you can easily migrate from your existing Compute instances to an E5 instance of compatible shape. Preemptible instances are enabled on E5, with Burstable instances and extended memory VMs to follow later.

Performance

We ran performance tests to exercise the CPU performance of E5 Standard instances on vendor-recommended proprietary compilers and Oracle Linux operating systems. We compared the E5 performance to our current E4 instances. As shown in the following graphic, the E5 standard bare metal instances and VM instances outperformed the previous E4 generations in both absolute performance and price-performance. We ran the tests several times and averaged the results. All SPEC numbers are estimates.

E5 Bare Metal instances showed twice the performance of E4 and 20% uplift in price performance

E5 VM instances showed 32% improvement comparing to E4 and 5% better price performance. The testing was based on 8OCPU VM with 128 GB memory.

Workloads

The E5 standard instances are suitable for a wide range of applications and use cases including the following examples:

• Video conferencing

• Real-time video processing

• Massively parallel processing and high-performance computing (HPC)

• Business-critical applications

• Web and application servers

• Backend servers for enterprise applications

• Gaming servers

• In-memory database

• Caching fleets

• App development environments

Instance availability

The E5 Standard VM and bare metal instances are available today in US regions, with plans to have instances in most regions by September and widely available in all global commercial regions in the future.

Available now

• US East (Ashburn)

• US West (Phoenix)

• US West (San Jose)

• US Midwest (Chicago)

Expected by September 2023

• Germany Central (Frankfurt)

• UK South (London)

• Canada Southeast (Toronto)

• India West (Mumbai)

• Brazil East (Sao Paulo)

• Brazil Southeast (Vinhedo)

• Australia East (Sydney)

• Netherlands Northwest (Amsterdam)

• Japan East (Tokyo)

• Australia Southeast (Melbourne)

• India South (Hyderabad)

Conclusion

You can benefit from this performance by deploying and migrating your workloads to these Compute instances today. To learn more about AMD EPYC CPU based cloud solutions for OCI, watch the video from our VP Ross Brown. For more information on the E5 Standard and flexible instances, you can access our documentation. For more Oracle Cloud Infrastructure solutions for AMD EPYC-powered Oracle Cloud instances, visit the AMD tech docs and white paper library. If you’re new to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, you can sign up for a trial account for free.