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."

Comments

Sparc

[TopSpin]

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.

... Sun was going to cut back the number of cores to eight and crank the clocks to 2.5 GHz ...

Re:and?

[Doc Ruby]

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.