Timothy Prickett Morgan speculates on the future of the SPARC M4 processor and the respective roles Oracle and Fujitsu might be expected to play in its manufacture. "Speculates" is the operant word because Morgan concedes that neither company is being particularly vocal about the M4. The piece concludes with the opinion that the Oracle-Fujitsu collaboration might well be viable, with Oracle concentrating on entry- and mid-level systems and Fujitsu on HPC interconnects and SPARC chips tuned for massively parallel supercomputers. Given Oracle's reticence on the subject, the author is pursuing Fujitsu for details. More later ... or not.
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The pdf of a slide presentation by Rick Hetherington and Greg Grohoski of Oracle introduces the Next Generation SPARC Processor: An In-Depth Technical Review. The following topics:
Hear Oracle VP of Hardware Development for the SPARC Processor Family Rick Hetherington discuss development of the SPARC T4 processor which differs, he says at the outset, from IBM's processors, for example, by its focus on throughput. Whether single-threaded or multi-threaded applications, the SPARC T4 is capable of delivering the required throughput, Hetherington contends and of enabling multi-tier data center resource consolidation as never before.
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Oracle's newly introduced SPARC T4 server line excels on mission-critical single threaded and highly concurrent workloads, enabling customers to consolidate multiple application tiers onto a single server, reducing system complexity and improving utilization. The end-to-end SPARC T4-4-based solution has proven itself 2.4x faster per socket than an all-IBM solution and 5.7x more performant than HP's Superdome 2 with 16 Itanium processors. The SPARC T4-4 server features build-in virtualization with live migration; on-chip cryptographic acceleration; and dynamic threads.
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Information on the beta program for Oracle's forthcoming SPARC T4 processor caught the attention of blogger Henkis, who draws on Oracle's own releases to furnish information on the release. "The aim here was to develop a processor core that would provide high-speed, single-thread performance while also addressing the needs of applications that benefit from the high efficiency and throughput of multithreaded cores. The SPARC T4 is up to five times faster than the SPARC T3 for single-threaded functions," says Rick Hetherington, vice president of hardware development at Oracle. "It's breakthrough technology for us." Further, still from Oracle, "The new systems use "critical thread API", or the ability of the Solaris operating system to recognize critical threads in applications and assign them, by themselves, to a single processor core. This allows the critical threads to run at the very highest performance levels without competing with other less critical threads. This delivers faster overall performance by accelerating the more critical components in threaded applications."
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