Dubbed the OCI Ampere A1 Compute, is designed to power general-purpose and cloud-native workloads that demand high performance at more manageable costs,

In a statement, Oracle said the offering was based on the Ampere Altra architecture built by Ampere Computing.

Today's announcement comes as Oracle makes a big investment into the Arm ecosystem more generally, with the availability of more resources and tools, including a new development environment for developers that are intended to support ARM-based application development.

ARM's central processing units are known for their extremely efficient, flexible and scalable architecture. They are most prominently used in smaller devices such as smartphones. Recently years, ARM has come to power everything from personal computers and "internet of things" devices to computer servers and even supercomputers.

Oracle said its new ARM compute instances come in a range of options and sizes to fit just about any workload, with choices including what it says are the industry's first Arm-based flexible virtual machine shapes that can be right-sized for different jobs. There are also more powerful bare metal server options.