Oracle To Debut Low-Cost SPARC Chip Next Month

jfruh writes: Of the many things Oracle acquired when it absorbed Sun, the SPARC processors have not exactly been making headlines. But that may change next month when the company debuts a new, lower-cost chip that will compete with Intel's Xeon. "Debut," in this case, means only an introduction, though -- not a marketplace debut. From the article: [T]he Sparc M7 will have technologies for encryption acceleration and memory protection built into the chip. It will also include coprocessors to accelerate database performance. "The idea of Sonoma is to take exactly those same technologies and bring them down to very low cost points, so that people can use them in cloud computing and for smaller applications, and even for smaller companies who need a lower entry point," [Oracle head of systems John] Fowler said. ... [Fowler] didn’t talk about prices or say how much cheaper the new Sparc systems will be, and it could potentially be years before Sonoma comes to market—Oracle isn’t yet saying. Its engineers are due to discuss Sonoma at the Hot Chips conference in Silicon Valley at the end of the month, so we might learn more then.

Comments

Licensing

[pr0nbot]

In related news, Oracle have also announced a new per-transistor licensing model.

Re:Licensing

[garyisabusyguy]

With 32 cores, this chip must have the Oracle licensing people very excited

Re:How timely...

[mlts]

SPARC and POWER still have a place. There are some computing tasks that can't really be split up among multiple nodes, so they still require gigantic CPU requirements. Usually this is related to legacy databases which cost less to keep on the legacy architecture than spend the time to try to move it to PC clusters.

Another use for SPARC and POWER (and to a lesser extent, ARM) are security applications. In theory (and this is theory, mind you), if another F0 0F bug is found on the x86 platform, perhaps giving attackers remote access to ring 0, having multiple architectures will help mitigate the effects of it.

Of course, with SPARC and POWER, virtualization is an integral component of both platforms, and for some tasks, it just might be the case that slicing off a lot of LPARS and zones may be cheaper than buying a lot of PCs and using a VMWare cluster, due to the license fees involved.

Low cost chip, high cost support

[ErichTheRed]

I'm sure the hardware itself will be cheap. Oracle's hardware is like IBM's mainframes -- they'll practically give away the hardware if you'll burn up MIPS on a regular basis. Even if "give away" is thousands per socket, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the fees for support and any OS licensing. Our relatively large company is a decent sized Oracle DB customer (lots and lots of hosted J2EE enterprisey applications) and the maintenance fees alone, just to be able to run the software, are eye watering.

The problem is that licensing like that keeps all but the most well heeled customers off SPARC, and hence the popularity will never get much higher than it is. Ever since Linux on x86 became a viable alternative, companies without a real need to run SPARC and by extension Solaris on SPARC are migrating away. Even Debian dropped support for its SPARC port.

Whether it's the high cost keeping people off SPARC, or the niche nature of Itanium keeping people off Itanium, a system architecture needs a critical mass of customers with a continued need to run on it to be successful.

Re:Low cost chip, high cost support

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

What I find a bit weird about SPARC's near-total obscurity is that(please correct me if I'm wrong on the details; but to the best of my understanding from what I've read) the ISA is available for use on a royalty-free basis, and there are even a few BSD or GPL verilog implementations out there. That's even less encumbered than MIPS(which has some patents that the owners like to wave around on a couple of useful instructions).

My naive expectation would have been that SPARC on such liberal terms would show up a bit more often embedded in various chips that need some sort of CPU to do housekeeping, as the ISA of security and/or nationalism driven 'indigenous technology' efforts, and potentially even as the cheaper-than-ARM option for application processors.

Clearly that hasn't actually happened, and it's mostly ARM in SoCs and application processors(with PPC holding out in certain automotive and networking niches for some reason; and MIPS in router SoCs and the occasional Chinese vanity project); so ARM's license fees must just not sting that much.

Building SPARC parts that go toe to toe with Xeons would obviously be a much more ambitious project(as well as an act of directly fucking with Intel's juciest margins, which they probably won't take very kindly); but I am surprised by the fact that SPARC is so rare among the zillions of devices that have no need for x86 compatibility and are mostly about delivering performance in the gap between beefy microcontrollers and weak desktops for as little money as possible.

Re:How timely...

[Tough Love]

MIPS is another arch with staying power, mainly because of being largely patent-free. Opencores has VHDL. IIRC, China has come up with some functioning clusters based on this and there are design wins to be found in embedded (e.g. Broadcom). I don't think there is really anything special about MIPS that makes it attractive. A servicable but unexciting architecture with some programmer-visible quirks that cater to ancient design assumptions that lost validity long ago. MIPS isn't going to die because some embedded designer is always going to find it the cheapest way to chip their product.

Translation for ordinary people

[Kjella]

Instead of costing an arm and a leg, Oracle's new chip will only cost you a couple fingers and a toe.

Re:How timely...

[alvieboy]

Yes, ESA (European Space Agency) uses SPARC, but another implementation (LEON2 and 3, fault tolerant versions [1] ). And NGMP[2] I think is also SPARC based.

LEON is developed by Gaisler, and was funded by ESA.

Alvie

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
[2] http://microelectronics.esa.in...

Re:Good Job Everyone, Congratulations

[Peter H.S.]

It highlights an important problem: the Debian project has been making one truly bad decision after another recently.

We all know about Debian's systemd disaster. It was an absolutely stupid move that seriously divided the Debian community, and forced many of its best users over to the BSDs and other OSes.

SPARC support was killed because there where no developers to maintain it. Debian doesn't have fat support contracts that enables the project to hire developers to support legacy architectures. So if a software project/package/architecture isn't supported by developers so that bugs get fixed, it will be killed off.

systemd was widely welcomed by almost all Debian developers and the vast majority of Debian end-users. There was a lot of noise of the Debian mailing lists when the decision was made, but it turned out that the tiny minority of systemd-opponents couldn't even muster 5 Debian Developers to sponsor a GR to overturn that decision.

They also pretty much killed Debian GNU/kFreeBSD near the end of last year.

Again, look at the Debian mailing list. There where practically zero Debian GNU/kFreeBSD developers active, meaning that bugs didn't get fixed, even release blocker bugs. Even Debian GNU/Hurd was a vibrating developer hub compared to kFreeBSD and probably had many more end users too.

If you want something in the open source world, you will have to contribute towards it, either by code, bug reports, translations/documentation or money. Both the SPARC architecture and kFreeBSD failed to receive enough of such support to survive.

Notice that Debian will continue to support SPARC on existing pre-Jessie SPARC releases, just not on future ones.

Re:How timely...

[Lord Apathy]

Horse hocky. My Nexis 7 rolled over and died a few weeks ago so I had to scare up a replacement tablet. I choose Asus Z580C to replace it. This tablet has a intel atom Z3530 processor in it, which I found out later is a x86 based processor.

I've had it for 2 weeks now and I've very pleased with it. To say the x86 can't be used well in a mobile processor is grade a bullshit.