Oracle's Sparc T5 Chip Evidently Pushed Back to 2013

Mark Hachman writes in Slash Datacenter that the Sparc T5 chip Oracle announced earlier this year apparently won't be ready until sometime in 2013. John Fowler, executive vice president, Systems, Oracle, presented at Oracle Open World a chart outlining highlights of Oracle's plans for the future. "But Fowler also skipped over some bad news: an apparent delay for the Sparc T5. A year ago, Oracle’s Sun division announced the Sparc T4—and according to Fowler, Oracle chief Larry Ellison set a very high bar for the next iteration: double the performance while maintaining app compatibility on an annual basis. Apparently, that didn’t quite happen with the T5; Oracle had the opportunity to announce a T5-based server, and didn’t. That’s a bit of bad news for the Sun design team, which already had to watch Intel’s Xeon chief, Diane Bryant, give the preceding keynote. ... As detailed at this year’s Hot Chips conference, the T5 combines 16 CPU cores running at 3.6 GHz on a 28-nm manufacturing process. Continuing the trend of hardware acceleration of specific functions, Sun executives claimed the chip would lead in on-chip encryption acceleration, with support for asymmetric (public key) encryption, symmetric encryption, hashing up to SHA-512, plus a hardware random number generator."

Comments

hardware, not software Re:Oracle? SPARC?

[Fubari]

Companies continue to force non-free software onto unsuspecting victims too.

Actually the fine article is about hardware; processors to be specific.
If I was heavily invested in Solaris I would be interested in the Sparc T5. Here are some excerpts from this Register article:

The Sparc T5 chip is more than just a shrunken Sparc T4 processor, which Oracle revealed at last year's Hot Chips conference and then started shipping in systems as 2011 wound down. The Sparc T4s had eight of the new S3 generation of Sparc cores, and the 3GHz clock speed and tweaks to the instruction pipeline were designed to make it much better at single-threaded work than its Sparc T chip predecessors. The Sparc T4 is manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp using its 40 nanometer processes, and the sixteen-core Sparc T5 chip uses the popular 28 nanometer processes from TSMC that a number of processor and graphics card makers are employing in their latest devices.

Getting back to sixteen cores on the Sparc T5 die, each with eight threads for running heavily threaded work, is a good use of the process shrink. Oracle could have gone a simpler route and double-stuffed the sockets with slightly modified Sparc T4 designs, akin to what IBM is doing with its Power7+ processors in some server configurations, to get to that sixteen core level. But, for whatever reason, Oracle wants to have all of the cores on the same die and running on the same crossbar interconnect.

Re:hardware, not software Re:Oracle? SPARC?

[armanox]

Sounds like SPARC has really gone nuts on the threading and core count. 16 cores with 8 threads each (per proc) makes for 128 threads per proc, which far outshines Intel and AMD.

Re:hardware, not software Re:Oracle? SPARC?

[sebt3]

Oracle SGBDR and options licences price is the key to understand why SPARC still matter.

For the same processing power, T4 cpu need less core than any x86 concurrent.
A client using spatial, partitionning and olap will need to rack up 66k$ per core (list price). Note that the licence requiered for a single core is more expensive than the server.

If you add that you only need to pay the licences you use on solaris thanks to the containers, and you can easyly imagine that a T4 solution usually is 2 times cheaper than a x86 solution.

Do I need to add the greater MTBF of these T4 machines or that it is the oracle developpement plateform of choice (thuss receive patches the first, windows is a 3rd cityzen in that context) ?