Oracle recently announced its eighth generation
SPARC platform, armed with new levels of security capabilities, performance, and efficiency for critical customer workloads. SPARC M8 processor-based systems, including the Oracle SuperCluster M8 engineered systems and SPARC T8 and M8 servers, are designed to seamlessly integrate with existing infrastructures and include fully integrated virtualization and management for private cloud.
SPARC M8 is compatible with all existing commercial and custom applications and provides always-on hardware-based memory protection for advanced intrusion protection and end-to-end encryption and Data Analytics Accelerators (DAX) with open APIs. It is intended to provide breakthrough performance and efficiency in the running Database analytics and Java streams processing. Oracle informed that Oracle Cloud SPARC Dedicated Compute service will also be updated with the SPARC M8 processor.
“SPARC was already the fastest, most secure processor in the world for running Oracle Database and Java. SPARC M8 extends that lead even further,” said Edward Screven, chief corporate architect, Oracle.
Oracle
claims that its SPARC M8-based servers are the world’s most advanced systems for enterprise workloads. It promises significantly faster performance for databases and Java applications compared with competitors’ systems, leading to more efficient software utilization. Oracle’s second-generation Software in Silicon technology in the SPARC M8 processor accelerates Oracle Database InMemory queries in Oracle Database 12c, and enables real-time analytics to be performed on OLTP databases and Java streams applications. Security in Silicon provides full-speed wide-key encryption, plus detection and prevention of attacks to application data in memory. SPARC M8’s silicon innovation promises to deliver the best and most secure mission-critical cloud infrastructure, new levels of performance and efficiency across all workloads, including:
- Database: Engineered to run Oracle Database faster than any other microprocessor, SPARC M8 delivers 2x faster OLTP performance per core than x86 and 1.4x faster than M7 microprocessors, as well as up to 7x faster database analytics than x86.
- Java: SPARC M8 delivers 2x better Java performance than x86 and 1.3x better than M7 microprocessors. DAX v2 produces 8x more efficient Java streams processing, improving overall application performance.
- In Memory Analytics: Innovative new processor delivers 7x Queries per minute (QPM)/core than x86 for database analytics.
This release has however intrigued the tech community which is wondering about the time of release - a few weeks ahead of Oracle Open World and the fact that SPARC M8 processors power the new SPARC T8 systems. It implies that they are not really T8 systems at all, but rather just smaller M8 systems. Oracle clarified it by saying that it is converging the T and M processors. That being said, SPARC M8 has some big architectural changes and is not just a process shrink with a few tweaks here and there.
The SPARC M8 is, of course, binary compatible. It can issue four instructions using out-of-order processing that has been common with RISC processors and the chip can have up to 192 instructions in flight at any time.
Comparison of the Sparc T, Sparc M, and Sparc S processors that were based on the S2, S3, and S4 cores.
Source: nextplatform.com
Oracle is committed to delivering the latest in SPARC and Solaris technologies and servers to its global customers and has also publicly committed to supporting Solaris until at least 2034.