Back in July 2024, Ampere Computing announced AmpereOne M on their road-map for Q4’2024 to provide AmpereOne with 12 channel DDR5 memory compared to eight memory channels with the original AmpereOne processors. Then this past May the AmpereOne M SKUs were announced while Ampere Computing stated these “M” processors had been shipping since Q4 of last year. Since then we haven’t seen or heard anything more about AmpereOne M nor the AmpereOne MX processors with up to 256 cores. Since then, the acquisition of Ampere Computing by SoftBank also was completed that made us wonder more about impacts to the roadmap and what hardware may or may not make it out to market. Well, today, we are finally seeing AmpereOne M availability in the public cloud with the new Oracle Cloud A4 instances.
Ampere Computing reached out on Friday to share that the AmpereOne M powered A4 instances are launching today in the Oracle Cloud / OCI. This is now one year past when AmpereOne M began “shipping” and the first public cloud provider with AmpereOne M. We also haven’t seen any AmpereOne M hardware in the retail space from any Internet vendors nor any review samples of AmpereOne processors/servers. There have been some server vendors announcing AmpereOne M platforms but not apparently shipping in any large quantities. Even the original AmpereOne processors remain difficult to find while aging Ampere Altra processors and motherboards remain available at Internet retailers and from the likes of System76 with their Thelio Astra workstations.
With AmpereOne M there is 12 channel DDR5 memory to match the memory bandwidth available with AMD EPYC Turin processors since last year with 12 channels @ DDR5-6400 or even older with AMD EPYC Genoa for 12 channels albeit at DDR5-4800 speeds. Next year with EPYC Venice is also 16 channel memory on the horizon. Intel Granite Rapids also since last year has sported 12 channel DDR5-6400 or even 12 channel MRDIMM-8800 memory (https://www..com/review/ddr5-6400-mrdimm-8800). AmpereOne M also uses the Ampere-1A (https://www..com/search/Ampere-1A) core revision of AmpereOne. Ampere-1A is a minor revision to AmpereOne that does bring a new fusion pair and various instruction timing differences. Ampere-1A also supports AArch64 MTE.
Anyhow, available today is the A4 Standard shapes in the Oracle Cloud using these new AmpereOne M processors. These new AmpereOne M instances in Oracle Cloud should provide better performance largely due to the additional memory bandwidth. I inquired about gratis access to Oracle A4 Standard for being able to deliver AmpereOne M benchmarks in not having any AmpereOne M access otherwise to date. I should be getting A4 access today so hopefully in a few days will have out some benchmarks for finally looking at the AmpereOne M performance benchmarks in the cloud.
