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Oracle Demos New SPARC T4 Processor

Posted by timothy on from the store-away-from-volatile-gases dept.

MojoKid writes "Oracle is publicly demonstrating its new T4 processor today and is shipping beta test systems to selected partners. The new T4 chip is a major departure from previous designs. The T4 offers a maximum of eight cores per physical chip and keeps the T3's eight-threads-per-core limitation. The T4 compensates for its lower maximum theoretical throughput in several ways. First, the T4 is an out-of-order processor with an enhanced branch predictor. Its maximum speed is said to be at least 3GHz, nearly double that of the 1.67GHz T3. Oracle claims the chip's single-threaded performance has been significantly boosted, and expects T4 to deliver a 2x-7x speed increase in single-threaded workloads compared to T3."

6 of 127 comments (clear)

  1. Not the point of SPARC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Is it me, or did Oracle completely miss the point of SPARC? We used to use SPARCs where I work for huge, multi-thread or child-spawning applications. If you want a number cruncher, go somewhere else. Go buy a POWER CPU. SPARC's shining glory is the massively threaded model where you spawn tons of little instances of the same thing that serve a quick, non-intensive purpose and die. Once again, Oracle is taking something they bought and trying to ram the square object into the round hole they call their business model.

    Interestingly enough, the captcha for this was "idiots"

    1. Re:Not the point of SPARC by eclectus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Is it me, or did Oracle completely miss the point of SPARC? We used to use SPARCs where I work for huge, multi-thread or child-spawning applications. If you want a number cruncher, go somewhere else. Go buy a POWER CPU. SPARC's shining glory is the massively threaded model where you spawn tons of little instances of the same thing that serve a quick, non-intensive purpose and die. Once again, Oracle is taking something they bought and trying to ram the square object into the round hole they call their business model.

      Interestingly enough, the captcha for this was "idiots"

      Do you really think Oracle could turn the ENTIRE chip engineering boat around in a year and a half? This best-of-both-worlds fast single threaded and massively multithreaded design was probably in the works for YEARS before Sun was bought.

      --
      This signature is a waste of 42 characters
  2. Re:high end CPUs from the database company by NoNonAlphaCharsHere · · Score: 4, Funny

    Well, in fairness, they did add an evil bit(TM) to the flags register. Unfortunately, in Oracle's case, "jump on evil" is an unconditional branch.

  3. Does that make any sense? by aglider · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I mean, to (re)introduce a new CPU in the market?
    Either the T4 can run Oracle SQL in silicon or it won't fit in between the Intel/AMD mature technology on one side and the rising (and power saving) ARM on the other one.
    Yes, you can build an "Oracle appliance" with whatever CPU you want, even your very own design. But then will the market share justify the efforts in CPU design?

    No, I don't think they won't ever succeed.

    --
    Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
    1. Re:Does that make any sense? by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 3, Informative

      # prstat
      Total: 341 processes, 9909 lwps, load averages: 20.86, 19.36, 20.41

      # prtdiag -v
      System Configuration: Sun Microsystems sun4u SPARC Enterprise M9000 Server
      System clock frequency: 960 MHz
      Memory size: 262144 Megabytes

      Only roughly 3 processes per core ... and yes that is 262 GIGA BYTES of Ram. How much again can an ARM address?

      Well, keep in mind: when we talk about SPARC or the Power PC architecture we also talk about memory bandwidth, failover safety, attached I/O devices etc.

      I don't see anyone trying to build "big iron" with ARMs right now.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  4. Re:Single thread performance by MetalliQaZ · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This comment may have been meant as a bite at Oracle, but it is really a good point. The T4 may be a departure, but that doesn't mean it isn't warranted. The chip is still massively parallel, but it has obviously been refocused. The question is, what does the application need? Perhaps the engineers saw the biggest gains for DB applications in boosting single thread performance. MySQL probably will benefit from the same things that benefit Oracle DB. What are the customer demands for power consumption? Are the tradeoffs balanced? Perhaps lower-power chips require too many servers to store and cool. The T4 still looks like a mighty processor.

    Still, if they venture too far into Intel's Xeon space, they will have a hard fight indeed.
    -d

    --
    "Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"