Working on Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M, I noticed the upper OCPU went up pretty high compared to X8M. This made me curious and I discovered the switch from Intel to AMD for the CPU:

Exadata X9M (Exadata Cloud Services)

[root@v1exacs01c1db01 ~]# more /proc/cpuinfo | grep "vendor_id|model name" | sort | uniq -c
8 model name : AMD EPYC 7J13 64-Core Processor
8 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
[root@v1exacs01c1db01 ~]#

Compare this to on-premises Exadata and they are still Intel processors:

Exadata X9M (on-premises)

[root@v1exadb01 ~]# more /proc/cpuinfo | grep "vendor_id|model name" | sort | uniq -c
76 model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8358 CPU @ 2.60GHz
76 vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
[root@v1exadb01 ~]#

Comparing with previous Exadata Cloud @ Customer and this is also still Intel processors:

Exadata X8M (Exadata Cloud @ Customer)

[root@v1exacc01c1db01 ~]# more /proc/cpuinfo | grep "vendor_id|model name" | sort | uniq -c
6 model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(R) Platinum 8270CL CPU @ 2.70GHz
6 vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
[root@v1exacc01c1db01 ~]#

This change make sense as the latest Intel processor is the “Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8358 Processor”, which has 32 cores and 64 threads.

Compare this with latest AMD processor “AMD EPYC™ 7713”, which has 64 cores and 128 threads. I believe the AMD EPYC 7J13 in the Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M is of the same family.

This allows Oracle to offer 252 OCPU for Quarter Rack, 2 sockets x 64 cores x 2 database servers less 2 cores per database servers for KVM. This is double what could be offered if Intel processors were used. And seems as Oracle charge per a OCPU, it’s a smart move that was quietly done 😉

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Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)