Oracle Ports Database to Arm-Based Ampere CPUs: Might Ditch Intel and AMD

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By Anton Shilov
published

Ampere's Ampere Altra can now run Oracle's Database software.

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(Image credit: Ampere Computing)

Oracle this week said that it had ported its Oracle Database 19c Enterprise Edition, the current long-term support release of Oracle Database, to Ampere's Altra processors that use the Arm instruction set architecture (ISA). The move marks a milestone both for Ampere and Arm ISA as Oracle is one of the most widely used enterprise software suites.

Separately, the company said that eventually it might ditch x86-based instances running Database on processors from AMD and Intel from its data centers in favor of instances enabled by Ampere CPUs. Oracle hopes that by tailoring its Database software for Ampere's single-thread CPUs, it will tangibly increase performance efficiency of its data centers. Furthermore, Ampere, in which Oracle is a lead investor, could also implement tweaks into CPUs to better run Oracle's Database.

"It is a major commitment to move to a new supplier. We've moved to a new architecture and we've moved to new supplier," Larry Ellison, Oracle's founder, said at an event hosted by Ampere, reports Reuters. "We think that this is the future. The old Intel x86 architecture, after many decades in the market, is reaching its limit."

Oracle Database 19c Enterprise Edition is now certified for work on Ampere Altra-based servers for both on-premises deployments and in the cloud by subscribing to Oracle Database Service using OCI Ampere A1 compute instances enabled by Ampere Altra on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). It will continue to be offered on AMD and Intel-powered instances probably for years to come. But with Arm-based Ampere servers, Oracle hopes to offer "highly economical price points."

Oracle's OCI Ampere A1 can be used in a flexible VM format ranging from 1 to 57 CPU cores, each with 8GB of memory (maxing out at 456GB), 1 Gbps of network bandwidth for each CPU core (up to a total of 40 Gbps per VM).

Oracle's Database enterprise database management software is used by large businesses, banks, government agencies, retailers, and manufacturers for running online transaction processing (OLTP), data warehousing (DW) and mixed (OLTP & DW) workloads. The software has been in development since 1979 and supports a wide variety of hardware and software platforms, including IBM's Mainframe and Power-bases systems, x86 CPUs from AMD and Intel, Sun's SPARC processors, Intel's IA64 (Itanium) chips, and now Arm-based Ampere Altra SoCs.

"Today's announcement highlights the broad architectural shift across the market to Ampere processors that meet the demands of both modern cloud and on-premises environments," said Jeff Wittich, Chief Product Officer of Ampere. "With the Ampere Altra family of processors, customers of the world's most popular database — Oracle Database — now have a high-performance, energy efficient architecture built with sustainability in mind for organizations of all sizes."

While running Database on energy-efficient cloud-native Ampere's Altra CPUs promises to make a lot of economic sense for Oracle, OCI still needs to offer high-performance computing (HPC), and Dense-IO instances for those who need maximum performance and ultra-fast local storage. So, this week the company announced OCI Compute E5 HPC and OCI Compute E5 Dense-IO instanced based on AMD's 4th Generation EPYC processors with their vast core counts and rich I/O capabilities.

Anton Shilov
Anton Shilov
Freelance News Writer

Anton Shilov is a Freelance News Writer at Tom’s Hardware US. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

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21 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Metal Messiah.
    So, they are now supposed to use the "Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN)" to back up and transfer databases without altering/harming them in any way.

    That being said, x86 still rules the roost. As per figures from research company Omdia, released last year, Arm chips have a 7% share of the data center processor market. However, this is up from less than 1% in 2019.

    Oracle's licensing constructs are more enticing for Ampere though, since Ampere CPUs are presumably rated at 0.25 licenses per core, which Oracle already offers for its own SPARC processors. According to data, recent AMD and Intel CPUs are rated as requiring 0.5 of a license for each physical core.

    Also, because Arm is an open architecture, the hardware for each Arm design is unique and can be heavily customized. But there are challenges on getting major enterprise applications like Oracle Database on Arm.

    Usually as in old context, rebuilding an app for ARM has meant recompiling the entire application: an "all-or-nothing" move, since all the binaries within a process need to be rebuilt before others can see the benefit. FWIW, this has also resulted in some buggy performance.

    As you may already know, that Arm and x86 are entirely different. In x86, the hardware, like graphic cards, storage, and the CPU are independent of each other. ARM processors on the other hand do not have a separate CPU, but rather, the processing unit is on the same physical substrate as the other hardware controllers as an integrated circuit/IC.

    So based on this, I think ARM can catch up pretty fast.
    Reply
  • Metal Messiah.
    FWIW, according to Microsoft's statement given last year, Azure VMs running on Ampere chips offered 50% better price-performance than x86-based VMs for scale-out workloads.

    So we can expect the same use cases to likely cover/span everything from web servers, application servers, open-source databases, cloud-native and rich .NET applications, Java apps, gaming servers etc.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    I'm sure they're only talking about their cloud-hosted instances. For customers running Oracle on their own hardware, Oracle would be shooting itself in both feet to drop support for x86-64, any time in the foreseeable future.
    Reply
  • rluker5
    bit_user said:
    I'm sure they're only talking about their cloud-hosted instances. For customers running Oracle on their own hardware, Oracle would be shooting itself in both feet to drop support for x86-64, any time in the foreseeable future.
    Aren't all Zen arch chips still vulnerable to SQUIP? Maybe Oracle is leaving AMD for security reasons in cloud hosted instances. They could also disable SMT but that wouldn't be good either.
    Reply
  • palladin9479
    This is... interesting. RDBMS is one of those things that greatly benefits from massive parallelism, which is something ARM can do well.
    Reply
  • dalek1234
    My take on this that with Intel not innovating much for a long time now, Oracle invested in Ampere because Oracle needed something efficient and it didn't look like Intel was going to deliver. Oracle had no choice. Thy hyperscalers did a similar thing; developed an ARM based chip in-house. None of them thought (few years ago) that AMD would become solution to x86 stagnation but it did. Still, Oracle recently released an EPYC based system, so maybe Oracle was hedging their bets by investing in Ampere too, just in case.
    Reply
  • NinoPino
    rluker5 said:
    Aren't all Zen arch chips still vulnerable to SQUIP? Maybe Oracle is leaving AMD for security reasons in cloud hosted instances. They could also disable SMT but that wouldn't be good either.

    rluker5 said:
    Aren't all Zen arch chips still vulnerable to SQUIP? Maybe Oracle is leaving AMD for security reasons in cloud hosted instances. They could also disable SMT but that wouldn't be good either.
    The SQUIP is a one year old vulnerability that affects zen 1,2,3, not zen4. Being so old, the mitigations are well known.
    Almost all of today's SMT architectures suffers from some sort of side-channel vulnerability. Does not depends from the ISA but from the architecture. I suppose that Ampere's have similar problems.
    Reply
  • palladin9479
    dalek1234 said:
    My take on this that with Intel not innovating much for a long time now, Oracle invested in Ampere because Oracle needed something efficient and it didn't look like Intel was going to deliver. Oracle had no choice. Thy hyperscalers did a similar thing; developed an ARM based chip in-house. None of them thought (few years ago) that AMD would become solution to x86 stagnation but it did. Still, Oracle recently released an EPYC based system, so maybe Oracle was hedging their bets by investing in Ampere too, just in case.

    It's more that while the x86 uArch is very good at high single treaded performance, it gets complicated to expand horizontally. ARM on the other hand is kind of the exact opposite, and while they've been getting better they aren't going to compete with Intel/AMD's branch predictor and loop unroller to enable ridiculous IPS. Yet it's very easy to just keep adding ARM processing units next to each other, it's no more difficult to have 64 units as it is to have 16 units. RDBMS's workload profile is very amenable to wide processing, they can just keep using new threads for each transaction / request to each shard.

    Basically down something like (just example) 16 cores at 5ghz vs 64 cores at 2.5ghz.
    Reply
  • TJ Hooker
    Metal Messiah. said:
    As you may already know, that Arm and x86 are entirely different. In x86, the hardware, like graphic cards, storage, and the CPU are independent of each other. ARM processors on the other hand do not have a separate CPU, but rather, the processing unit is on the same physical substrate as the other hardware controllers as an integrated circuit/IC.
    I don't understand what you're trying to say here, can you rephrase or elaborate?
    Reply
  • bit_user
    TJ Hooker said:
    I don't understand what you're trying to say here, can you rephrase or elaborate?
    He just thinks all ARM CPUs are SoCs. Given how many actually are, it's somewhat understandable (but obviously wrong).

    @Metal Messiah. here are the CPUs they're talking about:
    https://amperecomputing.com/briefs/ampereone-family-product-briefhttps://www.nextplatform.com/2023/05/18/ampere-gets-out-in-front-of-x86-with-192-core-siryn-ampereone/
    In other words, it's just a standard server CPU. No graphics or other specialized IP blocks.

    Bonus: here's Amazon's Graviton 3:
    https://www.nextplatform.com/2022/01/04/inside-amazons-graviton3-arm-server-processor/
    Reply