Oracle Brings AMD Epyc Chips to the Cloud

Advanced Micro Devices’ continued re-entry into the server market behind the strength of its Epyc chips launched last year got another boost this week when Oracle officials said they were introducing Epyc-based instances in the company’s Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The tech vendors announced the move this week at the Oracle OpenWorld 2018 show, with Oracle officials saying the company is the first public cloud provider to offer the Epyc chips in bare metal instances, though they noted that they also are using the processors in VM compute instances with one, two, four and eight cores. In addition, 16- and 24-core VM instances will be provided in the first half of 2019. The partnership highlights the efforts of two top tech vendors looking to gain ground in highly competitive markets that are dominated by a single player. AMD for more than a decade, since the launch of its initial Opteron processors, has steadily lost ground to Intel, which holds more than 95 percent of the data center market. Meanwhile, Oracle, which was late to the cloud game, is looking to gain ground on Amazon Web Services, which holds about 40 percent of the public cloud space, and other major players like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.