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  • drexnx - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link

    I wonder if you can make more than $3.05/hr crypto mining on an A100....
  • Dusk_Star - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link

    If you could, it would drive the difficulty up such that $3.05/hr was just at breakeven.
  • Arsenica - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link

    " For example, Oracle expects their A100 instances to be the cheapest on the market at $3.05 per GPU hour"

    As this is Oracle I have the feeling that there will be hidden fees. Like acquiring a license to unlock each Tensor core being used.
  • GreenReaper - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link

    The big three underestimate Oracle at their peril. They've put serious work into their cloud platform, and they have a free offer that in many ways (notably transfer and storage speed) outclasses the competition - and which is getting developers and administrators like myself to try them out.

    Whether that translates into purchases is unclear, but it's a number's game; they clearly want to be at the table, and they're pouring a lot into setting up datacenters round the world to make it happen.
  • senttoschool - Tuesday, September 22, 2020 - link

    Oracle has an advantage over Amazon and Oracle in the enterprise cloud because they serve so many enterprise customers already. The enterprise trusts Oracle, but they might not trust Amazon or Google. Microsoft is also trusted by enterprises.

    However, I highly doubt that startups will choose to use the Oracle cloud because Oracle just doesn't know how to build and market products for small companies like Amazon and Google do.
  • Teckk - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link

    AWS is the current leader, Microsoft second. I'm sure enterprise doesn't run on "trust".
  • duploxxx - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link

    Oracle and there licensing whoos (Oracle DB, java, ....) and you really think Enterprises still "trust" Oracle... far from.
  • GreenReaper - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link

    To an extent, yes. I felt a certain tension dealing with the bureaucracy of support requests. Also having to try repeatedly over a month to get instances in Brazil (admittedly an exotic region).

    However, startups work with what they can get. If they get a good offer from Oracle, they'll use it. Many products are standardized now and finding the options is a short search away.
  • mpschan - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link

    I don't know a single person with exposure to Oracle and their licensing/audit practices that would touch anything sold them. None. I wouldn't spend a penny using compute time from Oracle for fear I'd somehow owe them $1000 at a later date.

    The only good thing that might come out of this would be pricing pressure on others.
  • FXi - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link

    Exactly. Oracle is quickly becoming almost the last party many would prefer to deal with.
  • FXi - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link

    Those enterprise customers would likely not trade AWS or Azure for ANY Oracle offering. But Oracle will get a new unfamiliar patch of ground to sell from, price. They won't compete on service from either of the top two - they aren't even playing in the same league. Surely their huge marketshare with Exalytics ought to give them a leg up right? lol
  • beginner99 - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link

    If we set price of A100 at around $12000 that means roughly 167 days of compute to break even if you buy one. I guess if you are in this market, you will easily break these 167 days.
  • p1esk - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link

    Keep in mind that the price of 8x A100 server ($24/hr on Oracle cloud) is more than double of 8x $12000.
  • PeachNCream - Wednesday, September 23, 2020 - link

    Don't forget infrastructure support costs like power, cooling, floor and rack space, administrators, and everything else that goes along with owning your own hardware. I've never been a big fan of third party hardware rentals, but there are some distinct cost advantages in out-sourcing all that work to a company that does it at scale and can realize better ROI because they focus more exclusively on delivering these services than a business that only needs to use compute resources to support some other, unrelated activity.
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