In the view of Timothy Prickett Morgan, writing in "The Register," "The SPARC T4 processor that Oracle expects to ship before the end of December ... is probably the most important chip that either Sun or Oracle has put into the field since the dual-core UltraSPARC-IV+ 'Panther'...." The new SPARC T core has a feature called the critical thread API that allows a high priority application to grab one thread on a core and hog all of the resources on that core to significantly boost performance of that single thread. The SPARC T4 will have double the per-thread performance of the T3 chip it will replace, according to Prickett Morgan, quoting Oracle sources.
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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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Oracle has augmented its virtualization portfolio with the release of Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.1, which comes installed on Oracle’s SPARC T-series servers. Oracle VM Server for SPARC allows up to 128 virtual machines, or "domains", on one system, providing organizations increased flexibility and improved server utilization.
Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.1 also delivers live migration capabilities to the SPARC T-series server family, including SPARC T3, UltraSPARC T2 Plus and UltraSPARC T2 based servers, allowing customers to quickly and easily migrate running domains from one physical server to another, eliminating application outages and server downtime.
In addition, Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center Virtualization Management Pack provides full lifecycle management of Oracle VM Server for SPARC.
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BMC Software has implemented Oracle’s SPARC Enterprise T-series servers with Oracle Solaris in its datacenters and research and development (R&D) department resulting in reduced organization-wide energy consumption and improved support for corporate innovation. Oracle's high-density, low power consumption SPARC T-Series servers help reduce data center costs with massive scalability, on-chip security, and built-in, no-cost virtualization enabling BMC to provide customers using BMC Software’s Business Service Management with a comprehensive approach and unified platform that that helps IT organizations cut costs, reduce risk and drive business profit.
In a three-year period, Oracle’s Sun SPARC Enterprise T5240 server has saved BMC on average between $20,000 and $35,000 in power costs per server. Oracle’s SPARC T3-2 server is expected to nearly double those savings, consuming one-eighth the power and emitting one-eighth the CO2 of existing UltraSPARC IIIi-based servers.
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Running a sample application of the Avitek Medical Records and Oracle WebLogic Server 11g software, a configuration using Oracle SPARC T3-1B and SPARC Enterprise M5000 servers, the latter running the Oracle database, showed excellent scaling of different configurations. The configuration had 2.1x times the transactional throughput over the previous generation UltraSPARC T2 processor based Sun Blade T6320 server module. The SPARC T3-1B server shows linear scaling as the number of cores in the SPARC T3 processor used in the SPARC T3-1B system module are doubled, writes Brian Whitney in a BestPerf blog. He notes that the Avitek Medical Records application instances were deployed in Oracle Solaris zones on the SPARC T3-1B server, allowing for flexible, scalable and lightweight architecture of the application tier.
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