Oracle A1 Benchmark - Comparison with E3 and E4

In the end of the 2nd semester of 2021, Oracle Cloud released a new kind of VM type: A1.Flex powered with ARM Ampere processors. After AWS, the red hyperscaler invest this architecture with its plus and cons. Basically the trend is the following, The modern ARMs cost less than their x86 equivalent with a performance at least equal to these last ones. The negative point is that all software and workloads aren't supported by this architecture, even if it has been largely popularized for the Linux enviironments, some specific package may not have been compiled for aarch64.

This study aims to compare the 3 last generations of Oracle VMs, E3.Flex, E4.Flex and A1.Flex. We captured the CPU performance with different tools and applied a performance/price formula to obtain a price/performance value.