Why is OCI better? Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s Compute vs Other Cloud Providers’ Compute
To understand the headlines, let’s understand what is a Virtual CPU.So different cloud vendors in market use virtual CPU as a measure of compute performance. Let’s see how one talks about compute when he uses any cloud. Generic words would be “I need X number of cores”. And this is obvious. There is no problem in having X number of cores. Obviously, more core, more compute performance. But what we miss is “threads”. Almost never, one talks about “threads” in general term while designing architecture. And that’s where cloud providers play a game: VCPU is measurement of threads which are used by all the VMs on a Hardware and this is a very basic definition.
As you see in the above image, threads are distributed across virtual machines. Actually, the virtual machine you are using can be dependent on virtual machines which someone else could be using on the same hardware and hence performance can be compromised.
However, with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, case is different. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure measures its compute performance using OCPU. How is it different? The OCPU also is equivalent to 1 physical core but the real difference is in the use of threads. Every virtual machine running on a hardware has dedicated threads. They are not shared among different virtual machines running on same hardware. Refer image below:
Okay, so now we understand by this reference, why virtual machines on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure should perform better.
The processor used in Cloud Providers are generally Intel Xeon where one physical core has two threads enabled. Hence,
1 OCPU = 2 Threads = 2 VCPU.
So 4OCPU in OCI = 8VCPU in other cloud providers with dedicated threads to every Virtual machine on one hardware.
Hope this helps while evaluating compute performance for your cloud vendor. For any queries, reach out to me.
The views presented in this post are my own and do not represent Oracle’s views
