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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."
I don't think losing some grumpy OpenOffice and OpenSolaris users qualifies as "everyone has already decided to move away from Oracle". Java will be used for a long time to come, and has big time penetration in the enterprise world, as does Oracle's database offerings. And while I agree that "cores" is a buzz word, I'm not so sure at that level it's all down to the quality of marketing. We're talking very big customers who in a lot of cases have very specific needs, and tailoring your hardware to fit with the market your serving isn't a dumb thing to do.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I wasn't aware the Alpha was that bad. I thought it was simply that the benefit of the processors wasn't great enough to convince companies to move from the much cheaper x86 platform. I saw a couple of Alpha desktops and they were pretty impressive.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
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? Obviously they will sell some product, (and yes, there is obviously some benefits to some customers, but not all) but I don't see how they are going to grow any new significant market share. There is a lot of options out there, and it isn't that expensive to throw a lot of cores at a problem. Any purchaser has to be wary and consider other options with a more open mind.
The problem is that Oracle is *perceived* to not be that concerned about the Sparc platform, whether it is true or not. If the public (or at least the ones making the buying decisions) thinks that they will just be phasing it out or letting it die on the vine, it doesn't matter if it is true or not. I just think Oracle has done a terrible PR job during the whole Sun transition and it will bite them in the ass over the next few years. They certainly haven't made ANY new friends.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
No. Nobody's moving away from Oracle - that rhetorical question doesn't make you sound like a smartass, but rather its less intelligent opposite.
What matters to Oracle's customers who buy Sun hardware is that their databases run as fast as possible, as that's the limiting factor on those customers' businesses. That's why Oracle bought Sun: to compete with IBM, which runs DB2 on IBM CPUs at the high end, the HW and SW tweaked to work best together for that operation.
Reducing the number of cores isn't designed to help. It's designed to leave that amount of transistors on the CPU available for making Oracle DBs run as fast as possible in the few simultaneous threads that Oracle needs for DB performance.
Oracle is not selling CPUs to the mass market that can't tell the difference among products, mostly because they don't have a benchmark that describes their use profile specifically. Oracle is selling to customers who pitch $:TPM to their bosses. And the $:TPM buzzword is not only not going out of style, it's what continues to drive $ to Oracle.
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make install -not war
ISTR benchmark after benchmark saying that they performed about as well as a Pentium Pro/II of the same clock speed, when running native code. Except they were doing 533 MHz when Pentium Pros were doing 200. Oh, and the benchmarks I remember showed that the Alpha could emulate x86 code as fast as the Pentium Pro 200 could run it natively, after DEC's emulation software had profiled the code.
The problem is this... they were also, IIRC, more EXPENSIVE than said Pentium Pro machines, and they could (for the Windows market) only run NT, when everyone targeted 95. And the performance advantage was completely wasted if your code wasn't written for Alpha. (So, you could run Office 95 and such on them, but because Microsoft only compiled the OS and maybe some server software, for general desktop AND workstation duty if your business needed Windows, a PPro box was cheaper and may have been able to do the same job.)
(Keep in mind that back then, Microsoft was ambivalent about x86, at least in the workstation and server market. Windows NT was written to run on quite a few popular processor families - MIPS, PPC, and Alpha, in addition to x86. And, Microsoft made what was essentially an AT Architecture MIPS system specification for running NT on MIPS.)
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?
I agree. That boat sailed about two years ago for us and we were a major Sun shop ( > 10,000 servers four years ago ). We are now almost exclusively VMware on Intel blades, mostly from IBM, or IBM P systems with IBM o/s. Vendors that were Solaris have moved to Linux. We briefly considered x86 Solaris but there was too much uncertainty with the on-again/off-again support for that platform.
Oracle DB is still at the core of our internal corporate computing because of an excellent licensing deal but we use alternatives for consumer facing services.
IMHO, the Sparc64 is hellishly expensive for the performance provided and the iron in the rack is heavy and power hungry. Nobody likes the M series servers. We don't like buying it, we don't like racking it, and we don't like what it does to our data center power distribution configuration.
The T series are not badly priced and are excellent low power consumption web servers but suck at anything that is single threaded. Almost all application software is effectively single threaded: either there is an explicit single execution path or the app has attempted threading but the threads depend on a core path that is single threaded. Usually I can get a brand name Intel multicore box that provides 4x the execution performance at a lower cost, ... and with 3 yr onsite h/w service thrown in.
Everything about Sun h/w is out of sync with what customers want.
Oracle is almost clueless when it comes to hardware sales and development. Try "www.sun.com"... you get a redirect to the Oracle home page and then you have to search for a link to the server product lineup. It's almost as if they are hiding the fact that they have a hardware product to sell. I don't think the Oracle brain trust knows what to do with Sun h/w and the Solaris o/s.
Oracle is a single core product software shop. That's their whole corporate culture and they don't really do other things well. What were they thinking when they bought Sun's h/w division? Possibly they could have just bought the rights to Solaris and developed it for the x86 h/w and made something of it. An argument could be made for the similarity between db and os development. But h/w? It's a black hole for Oracle. SPARC is dead. Write it off.
Now if IBM had bought Sun and turned their R&D folk loose... there would have been hope for Solaris. Too bad so sad.
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.
Uhhh...how EXACTLY is "Oracle ruining" anything at all? They are simply going to halve the cores and hopefully give single threads a serious kick in the ass. It is just as I said here when everyone thought Oracle was gonna kill SPARC and Solaris: Oracle is gonna offer a "top to bottom" IBM style stack, with a custom SPARC chip and a stripped down Solaris both optimized for running an Oracle DB with high throughput.
Frankly I think it is a damned good business move and will probably make old Larry another mountain of money. It was pretty obvious that Sun with their flip flopping all over the place simply couldn't figure out how to make money with what they had, and old Larry took one look and figured he did. Considering how many enterprises run Oracle DB, and how PHBs like having only a single vendor to deal with, where is the bad? It is just business 101: buy a business that is floundering, get rid of the dead weight, and the revitalize the good parts. I have NO doubts that in three years or less Oracle will be THE DB to run in large and small enterprises, with a custom setup that will be easy to deploy and have incredible throughput. So where is the bad?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.