Monday, July 3rd 2023

Oracle to Spend Billions on NVIDIA Data Center GPUs, Even More on Ampere & AMD CPUs

by
T0@st
 Discuss (11 Comments)
Oracle founder and Chairman Larry Ellison last week announced a substantial spending spree on new equipment as he prepares his business for a cloud computing service expansion that will be aimed at attracting a "new wave" of artificial intelligence (AI) companies. He made this announcement at a recent Ampere event: "This year, Oracle will buy GPUs and CPUs from three companies...We will buy GPUs from NVIDIA, and we're buying billions of dollars of those. We will spend three times that on CPUs from Ampere and AMD. We still spend more money on conventional compute." His cloud division is said to be gearing up to take on larger competition—namely Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Corp. Oracle is hoping to outmaneuver these major players by focusing on the construction of fast networks, capable of shifting around huge volumes of data—the end goal being the creation of its own ChatGPT-type model.

Ellison's expressed that he was leaving Team Blue behind—Oracle has invested heavily in Ampere Computing—a startup founded by ex-Intel folks: "It's a major commitment to move to a new supplier. We've moved to a new architecture...We think that this is the future. The old Intel x86 architecture, after many decades in the market, is reaching its limit." Oracle's database software has been updated to run on Ampere's Arm-based chips, Ellison posits that these grant greater power efficiency when compared to AMD and NVIDIA enterprise processors. There will be some reliance on "x86-64" going forward, since Oracle's next-gen Exadata X10M platform was recently announced with the integration of Team Red's EPYC 9004 series processors—a company spokesman stated that these server CPUs offer higher core counts and "extreme scale and dramatically improved price performance," when compared to older Intel Xeon systems.
Sources: Reuters, Kim Kulish/Getty (image source)

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11 Comments on Oracle to Spend Billions on NVIDIA Data Center GPUs, Even More on Ampere & AMD CPUs

#1
Wirko
Hey, isn't Larry making his own processor, "Spock" or something? Or has he given up?
Posted on Reply
#2
Canned Noodles
WirkoHey, isn't Larry making his own processor, "Spock" or something? Or has he given up?
I don’t think there have been any major releases to the SPARC processors or servers for a number of years. It’s kind of a shame because a lot of the really old SPARC-based systems were real neat.
Posted on Reply
#4
Daven
No love for Intel and for good reason. They stopped competing for too long even though it was unintentional.
Posted on Reply
#5
Wirko
DavenNo love for Intel and for good reason. They stopped competing for too long even though it was unintentional.
Somebody please tell that to Intel.
download.intel.com/newsroom/2023/data-center-hpc/4th-Gen-Xeon-Customer-Fact-Sheet.pdf
Oracle is excited about bringing the new Intel 4th Generation Xeon Scalable platform with built-in accelerators to Oracle cloud infrastructure, and it will be supporting the new 4th generation platform across all its cloud compute technologies.
... and you'd think that all them accelerators would have Oracle salivating for faster-than-light Xeons. Here are some of the accelerators that Oracle's Database and other server software should be able to use extensively:
  • QuickAssist Technology (QAT): Offloads data encryption, decryption and compression.
  • Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA): Improves the performance of storage, networking, and data-intensive workloads by speeding up streaming data movement and transformation operations across the CPU, memory caches, and main memory, as well as all attached memory, storage, and network devices.
  • Dynamic Load Balancer (DLB): Improves overall system performance by facilitating the efficient distribution of network processing across multiple CPU cores and threads and dynamically balancing the associated workloads across multiple CPU cores as the system load varies. Intel DLB also restores the order of networking data packets processed simultaneously on CPU cores.
  • In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA): Increases query throughput and decreases the memory footprint for in-memory databases and big data analytics workloads.
  • Crypto Acceleration: Moves data encryption into hardware, which increases the performance of pervasive, encryption-sensitive workloads such as the secure sockets layer (SSL) used in web servers, 5G infrastructure, and VPNs/firewalls.
  • Speed Select Technology (SST): Improves server utilization and reduces qualification costs by allowing public, private, and hybrid cloud customers to configure a single server to match fluctuating workloads using multiple configurations, which improves total cost of ownership (TCO).
  • Data Direct I/O Technology (DDIO): Reduces data-movement inefficiencies by facilitating direct communication between Ethernet controllers and adapters and the host CPU’s memory cache, thus reducing the number of visits to main memory, which cuts power consumption while increasing I/O bandwidth scalability and reducing latency.
Posted on Reply
#6
Daven
WirkoSomebody please tell that to Intel.
download.intel.com/newsroom/2023/data-center-hpc/4th-Gen-Xeon-Customer-Fact-Sheet.pdf

... and you'd think that all them accelerators would have Oracle salivating for faster-than-light Xeons. Here are some of the accelerators that Oracle's Database and other server software should be able to use extensively:
  • QuickAssist Technology (QAT): Offloads data encryption, decryption and compression.
  • Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA): Improves the performance of storage, networking, and data-intensive workloads by speeding up streaming data movement and transformation operations across the CPU, memory caches, and main memory, as well as all attached memory, storage, and network devices.
  • Dynamic Load Balancer (DLB): Improves overall system performance by facilitating the efficient distribution of network processing across multiple CPU cores and threads and dynamically balancing the associated workloads across multiple CPU cores as the system load varies. Intel DLB also restores the order of networking data packets processed simultaneously on CPU cores.
  • In-Memory Analytics Accelerator (IAA): Increases query throughput and decreases the memory footprint for in-memory databases and big data analytics workloads.
  • Crypto Acceleration: Moves data encryption into hardware, which increases the performance of pervasive, encryption-sensitive workloads such as the secure sockets layer (SSL) used in web servers, 5G infrastructure, and VPNs/firewalls.
  • Speed Select Technology (SST): Improves server utilization and reduces qualification costs by allowing public, private, and hybrid cloud customers to configure a single server to match fluctuating workloads using multiple configurations, which improves total cost of ownership (TCO).
  • Data Direct I/O Technology (DDIO): Reduces data-movement inefficiencies by facilitating direct communication between Ethernet controllers and adapters and the host CPU’s memory cache, thus reducing the number of visits to main memory, which cuts power consumption while increasing I/O bandwidth scalability and reducing latency.
There are literal quotes from the article above about leaving team Blue, buying from everyone but Intel and that Intel reached its limits. Literal quotes in the article just above. It would literally take you 30 seconds to read the whole article.
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#7
Wirko
DavenThere are literal quotes from the article above about leaving team Blue, buying from everyone but Intel and that Intel reached its limits. Literal quotes in the article just above. It would literally take you 30 seconds to read the whole article.
I wanted to point out the difference between then (Sapphire launch six months ago, when INTC said ORCL is so happy with them) and now (ORCL no longer knows who INTC is).
Posted on Reply
#8
Daven
WirkoI wanted to point out the difference between then (Sapphire launch six months ago, when INTC said ORCL is so happy with them) and now (ORCL no longer knows who INTC is).
I apologize. I misinterpreted your post.
Posted on Reply
#10
bushlin
WirkoI wanted to point out the difference between then (Sapphire launch six months ago, when INTC said ORCL is so happy with them) and now (ORCL no longer knows who INTC is).
Always beware the commentator who refers to companies by their stock market acronyms.
Posted on Reply
#11
Wirko
bushlinAlways beware the commentator who refers to companies by their stock market acronyms.
I've been berated before for using acronyms like Ge and Cu unnecessarily in semiconductor chemistry-related threads, so there.

I've worked with Oracle Database a lot, and to me ORCL is primarily an acronym that denotes the default ID of several database-related things and appears a lot in config files etc. As for INTC, I just see the fact that Intel's investor site is intc.com a bit funny, and peculiar too. I know of no other company that did that. Maybe NVDA would but the domain is already taken.

Referring to giant, infinitely greedy faceless corporations by their stock market acronyms also seems very much appropriate to me.

If you feel I'm talking like an investor, so I should be feared, that's not true. I own about 1/8 of a 5nm (maybe 3nm) wafer's worth in TSM.

The one who needs to beware of myself is mostly myself, as can be said of many people.
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