What is Arm?
180 billion Arm-based processors have been shipped in mobile phones, IoT sensors, and other devices to date. Now, the technology has evolved to support hyperscale data centers and cloud computing. Arm-based processors, including Ampere Altra, are interesting for cloud customers because they scale linearly, provide predictable performance, and provide the highest density of cores, all at a lower price point. With Arm-based cloud compute, customers can run existing workloads less expensively and build new applications with superior economics and performance. To help developers transition, build, and run Arm-based workloads, Oracle has joined forces with Ampere Computing, Arm, GitLab, Jenkins, and others with a singular goal: to accelerate the Arm developer ecosystem with the best tools and platform possible.
Why Arm Processors?
With the introduction of 64-bit computing in the Armv8 architecture and Neoverse family, Arm has entered the server market with partners like Ampere Computing. Virtualization of hardware and the emergence of cloud computing have accelerated this transition. In our industry, we are at an inflection point, where once again multiple CPU architectures will become the norm. Customers will once again have diversity and choice for building their next generation of applications, and Arm, X86, and GPUs are leading the way.
The Arm Neoverse N1 CPU architecture is specifically designed for the data center and cloud infrastructure space. It delivers a high core count server-class SoC subsystem with the performance, features, and scalability needed to accelerate the transformation to a scalable cloud-to-edge infrastructure. It fundamentally changes the performance equation for hyperscale data centers and cloud computing, delivering far more work on far fewer watts than conventional technologies.
Ampere Computing’s Altra processors are based on the Neoverse N1 CPU architecture. Ampere took the N1 platform and integrated its own innovations to design an SoC uniquely built for applications across hyperscale cloud data centers. The increased thread counts, higher CPU frequencies, and better core densities result of the N1 Arm processors lead to many benefits.
Benefits of Oracle Arm Processor
Revolutionary compute performance
Neoverse N1 Arm CPUs are designed and optimized for high performance and hyperscale data centers. These CPUs deliver full frequency sustained performance and with single threaded core architecture you can run workloads with a consistent and predictable performance while achieving ideal scaling. The caching structures of these CPUs are sized for large, branch-heavy infrastructure workloads.
Predictable performance and scaling at lower cost
Customers can now run scale their workloads predictably at lower cost. Arm processors, such as Ampere’s Altra processor, single thread per core architecture allows you to run workloads with a consistent and predictable performance while achieving ideal performance scaling. The cores are wholly isolated from the noisy neighbor impact of other workloads running on the same processor. This is a benefit both for ‘scale-up’ workloads needing a very high core count, and for ‘scale-out’ workloads that benefit from multiple instances of smaller VM shapes. And predictable performance also means a more predictable bill at the end of the month. Web server, API Gateways, media encoding, AI inferencing and other workloads that are processor bound will see significant cost savings.
Did you know?
The world’s fastest supercomputer Fugaku, a computer in Kobe co-developed by Riken and Fujitsu, makes use of Fujitsu’s Arm-based system-on-chip. Arm processors topped the list of processor architectures used in building supercomputers.
Better security
Customers can run their workloads on Arm securely
Ampere Altra processors single thread per core processor design eliminates the potential thread-security issues and provides isolation for customer workloads. This helps lower the risk due to side channel attacks. By running only a single thread per core, there is no sharing of the execution engine, registers, and L1/L2 cache between threads, which minimizes the attack surface for exploits.
Arm TrustZone, a hardware security extension technology, offers an efficient, system-wide approach to security with hardware-enforced isolation built into the CPU. It provides the perfect starting point for establishing a device root of trust based on Platform Security Architecture (PSA) guidelines. ARM TrustZone provides a secure execution environment by splitting computer resources between two execution worlds, namely normal world and secure world.
Designed for a wide range of workloads
Arm server-side processors such as Ampere’s Altra are designed to meet the most demanding workload requirements for a wide variety of data center deployments.
- General Purpose Workloads—web applications, application servers
- Cloud Native Applications—Docker container-based applications
- Computationally Intensive Applications—media encoding, AI Inferencing, HPC applications
- Arm Native Mobile App Development—Android VM for developing and testing mobile applications
- In-memory caches and databases—Redis, Memcached databases, open-source databases
Read the Moor Insights & Strategy technical brief.
Foundational Arm Software Stack
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What is Oracle doing to support Arm server-side development?
Arm, Ampere, and leading ISVs such as GitLab and Jenkins are partnering with Oracle to make Arm server-side development easy and cost effective. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), in collaboration with partners, provides an easy path to transition, build, and run your Arm-based applications with the best price-performance in the cloud. Ampere’s Altra processors based on the Arm aarch64 architecture are available on OCI as both bare metal servers and Virtual Machines (VMs). Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), in collaboration with partners, provides an easy path to transition, build, and run your Arm-based applications with the best price-performance in the cloud. Ampere’s Altra processors based on the Arm aarch64 architecture are available on OCI as both bare metal servers and Virtual Machines (VMs). Leading ISV developer tool vendors such as GitLab, Jenkins, Rancher, Genymobile, open-source organizations such as Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF), and technology partners such as Arm and Ampere, are collaborating with Oracle to provide tools and software to build and run server-side Arm-based solutions. Oracle has released supported aarch64 distributions of Oracle Linux, Java, and MySQL to jumpstart your development on the Arm compute platform.
Introducing Ampere Altra
Ampere’s Altra processors, the industry's first 80-core server processor, brings extreme performance, scalability, and power efficiency to drive the next generation of applications.
- Up to 160 cores in dual socket configuration
- Neoverse N1 Cores Arm v8 Architecture
- No noisy neighbors—1 thread / core
- 3.0 GHZ—Run all cores at the maximum frequency
- 64 KB L1 I-cache, 64 KB L1 D-cache on each core
- Up-to 1TB of Memory
- Coherent Mesh Network
- AI inference acceleration
- 7 nm process technology
Ampere’s Arm processors are suitable for general purpose workloads as well as rapidly growing applications such as data analytics, mobile applications, machine learning inferencing, in-memory databases, web hosting and cloud native applications.