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Oracle To Halve Core Count In Next Sparc Processor
angry tapir writes "Oracle will halve the number of cores in its next Sparc processor and instead improve its single-thread performance, a weak area for the chip but one that's important for running large databases and back-end applications. The next Sparc chip on Oracle's roadmap, the T4, will have eight cores on each chip, down from 16 in the current Sparc T3."
Oracle Ruins Everything
Not trying to be a smartass, but does it really even matter? Hasn't almost everyone already decided to move away from Sun/Oracle, excepting those with a tremendous investment in that area? Can their sales really do anything except go down on the hardware side? And reducing the number of cores can't help, as cores is now the buzzword, just like megahertz was back in the Pentium days. Even AMD had to fudge the model names back then to get people to buy the processors, which admittedly were faster per Mhz than Intel, but customers looked at raw numbers. I would think that cores would be the same, even with a more sophisticated buyer.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
the problem is obviously attention to detail... engineers who do not take pride in the functional optimization of their products.
but the real question is how will this chip improve Oracle's ability to rape its customers? When I'm decided between Oracle and another platform, the issue of the magnitude and quality of Oracle's raping of me is a key deciding factor.
is another veiled sun downsize?
Bill Gates was quoted as saying "320 cores should be enough for anybody".
Does it maybe mean more register windows?
Because that would certainly help things like Java, and presumably oracle.
Anybody know how often a large query spills registers?
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I'm pretty sure this was on Suns roadmap. Higher throughput per thread. Higher clock speeds. So have Oracle deviated from the plan Sun had?
I don't think the author had any understanding of the history of SPARC or Oracle (Sun)'s product linup. Here is an informative interview from the useful Sun hardware oriented blog on the subject http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/ http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/innovation/innovator-hetherington-191304.html
Plato seems wrong to me today
The reduction in cores from 16 to 8 was part of the Sparc road-map before Sun was acquired by Oracle. Despite a lot of speculation it appears Oracle is following through with the plans they bought from Sun.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Reducing the core count lets Oracle make each core bigger, to add features making each faster. But can't Oracle keep the same core count, and instead of increasing the core count in the next generation the way most other CPU makers will, just add circuits to each existing core? Is it really necessary to reduce the count? Process size will probably also be shrinking in that generation, and new tricks developed, as usual. Can't Oracle just make a bigger chip, and also keep the benefits of the high core count Sun already achieved?
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make install -not war
but that doesnt really matter now does it? We know your application only supports 2 and scalability isn't an option.
world's Gay NiGger
When will people realize that not everything runs better on more cores, especially stuff that's highly dynamic say like a database query which is effectively a long sequence of conditionals. You talk to people and the first thing they ask is "yeah, but how many cores does it have"... it's like multithreading didn't exist until dualcore cpus.
A cpu has a limited amount of processing power; some things you can only do in sequence ergo you can't do them in parallel ergo you're limited by the core-speed ergo you're fucked with 16 core 1GHz machine against a 1 core 2GHz machine.
At the very least, Oracle has introduced a great deal of uncertainty into Sun products, so you have to ask "What does Sun hardware offer than other hardware doesn't?". With all the bad press, they have an uphill battle converting people to Sun from other platforms, and for those who have a choice, what *exactly* is the big benefit that can't be purchased from someone else for less?
Do you care about crypto at all? If so, the T-series CPUs have on-die MD5, SHA-1, SHA-2 family, DES, 3DES, AES (multiple modes of operation), RC4, RSA (up to 2Kb), and ECC acceleration, as well as RNG. The T3s can do almost 80 Kop/sec for RSA 1024. All you have to do is link against the Solaris-provided OpenSSL library and call the appropriate "engine" APIs to activate things (this is built-in to a lot of FLOSS software already (e.g., Apache)).
The T5220 (T2 processor, the T3 just came out) has been benchmarked as doing 44 Gb/s AES128: and that's on the crypto co-processors, so the "real" processors are free to do "actual" work--like serving HTTP requests. At the same time as this, the T2 can also do 38 Kop/sec of RSA 1024. At the time this benchmark was published, a quad-core Xeon 3 GHz could do about 8 Gb/s AES1028 and 9 Kop/s of RSA1024 signing--with little to nothing left over to do anything else.
So you ask, "what can these systems do?" Well, how about: instead of paying for a bunch layer of load balancers to do SSL and RSA, and a whole bunch more machines to do actual web requests, why not just buy a lot fewer T2s (now T3s), and save power, cooling, and rack space?
The T-series is not good at everything, but for the mutl-threaded, multi-client workloads it was designed for it works very well.
I said "Can HAVE cores plz"!!!!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
ah perhaps then we should use OS/2 instead of Solaris when they half single core CPUs..
Sun already tried this and had to give up. Sun's CPU design team just couldn't get the mode complex cored to work at competitive speeds.
I think that Oracle is making a big mistake here. They should let Fujitsu develop the big cores (which they are supremely good at) and themselves concentrate on the highly-multithreaded ones, which they are good at.
I don't see why this is a problem for developers, since the compilers take care of the CPU-specific details, and if your code is written in Java, it's a non-issue anyway.
Stick Men
My job is to maintain and enhance an industrial scheduling system. The G2-based platform is single threaded, as is the simulation engine (written in C++). It's grown from 3 concurrent users in 1999 to 31 today, and from 50 simulations per day to nearly 300. We've moved from SPARC to SPARC when new chips offered better prformance. The engine was written for, and so far can only be compiled with, Sun's compiler.
I'm sure we're not alone in having significant investment in single-threaded computational software. We've decided to ditch Sun, and a project is currently under way to port the engine.
It's a shame. I really quite like the stability we get on SPARC. But they've been too stagnant, and we've grown tired of waiting. Throw in the risk of losing support for hardware running a critical system, and there's no way we can stay on Sun.