By Stephen Nellis
MENLO PARK, California (Reuters) – Oracle on Wednesday said that it has modified its flagship database software to work on a new category of computing chip, starting with chips from Ampere Computing, a startup founded by former Intel executives.
Oracle’s database software is used by major banks and corporations to track transactions. For the past several decades, the software has been written to run on chips from Intel.
On Wednesday, Oracle said that the database will now also run on chips made based on a technological architecture from Arm Ltd, the same underlying technology that is in mobile phones. The first chips Oracle’s database will use are from Ampere, a company founded by Intel’s former president that has confidentially filed for an initial public offering and in which Oracle is also a shareholder.
“It’s a major commitment to move to a new supplier. We’ve moved to a new architecture and we’ve moved to new supplier,” Larry Ellison, Oracle’s founder, said during an event hosted by Ampere. “We think that this is the future. The old Intel X86 architecture, after many decades in the market, is reaching its limit.”
Oracle is using Ampere’s chips in its own data centers in its cloud computing service, which is trying to catch up to market leaders such as Amazon Web Services. Ellison said Ampere’s chips are much more power efficient than offerings from its other two major chip suppliers, Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia.
Ellison said that, for regulatory reasons, some Oracle data centers cannot obtain any more electricity, so the only way the company can keep expanding its cloud service is by doing more computing for each watt of power it can access, which is why it has turned to Ampere’s chips.
“We have got more room. We just don’t have more electrical capacity. By upgrading to Ampere, we’re able to take that room, double the compute and stay within the same power envelope,” Ellison said.
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in Menlo Park, California; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
