Ampere Altra and AmpereOne — the value leaders
Best OCI ARM Instances
OCI's Ampere-based shapes (A1, A2, A4) consistently top the value rankings. Ampere Altra (A1) offers an unbeatable price-to-performance ratio for general-purpose workloads. AmpereOne (A2) improves on A1 by roughly 28% on average for cloud-native workloads — PostgreSQL (+27%), MySQL (+59%), and Nginx (+18%) — while sharing the same pricing tier. The newer AmpereOne M (A4) pushes another 35–45% ahead. All three families run standard Linux workloads, Docker containers, and Kubernetes without modification, making ARM the default choice for greenfield cloud-native workloads.
What to look for
ARM shapes on OCI are priced aggressively and deliver strong multi-threaded throughput. They run standard Linux software unchanged and are fully compatible with Docker and Kubernetes. For greenfield workloads, ARM is the default choice for cost efficiency.
- →Value score (PassMark/vCPU ÷ $/vCPU/hr)
- →PassMark per vCPU
- →$/vCPU/hr
- →CPU family (A1 / A2 / A4)
Ranked instances — 5 shapes
| # | Shape | $/vCPU/hr |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | $0.0100 | |
| 2 | $0.0100 | |
| 3 | $0.0069 | |
| 4 | $0.0069 | |
| 5 | $0.0070 |