It's competitive if you don't actually need the 28.8TB NVMe SSD. If you actually need that much storage capacity and speed you are looking at provisioning 2 i3.16xlarge's and hoping your application can be distributed across multiple instances.

Sure, and if you need 1 or 2 TB of RAM, Oracle won't be able to help, and that's a much harder parameter to work around...

Anyway, my point was that it didn't, IMHO, "easily mop the floor with AWS on price/performance ratio".

On RAM, yes. On random IOPS and throughput to the 28.8TB NVMe storage - no comparison.

Do you have some numbers? According to here [1] an i3.16xlarge will get you "up to to 3.3 million random IOPS at a 4 KB block size and up to 16 GB/second of disk throughput. "

What does Oracle claim? I see here they say 1 million IOPS.[2]

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/ec2-instance-type-update-t2...

[2] http://www.biwasummit.org/biwa/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/84...