Oracle Demos New SPARC T4 Processor 127
MojoKid writes "Oracle is publicly demonstrating its new T4 processor today and is shipping beta test systems to selected partners. The new T4 chip is a major departure from previous designs. The T4 offers a maximum of eight cores per physical chip and keeps the T3's eight-threads-per-core limitation. The T4 compensates for its lower maximum theoretical throughput in several ways. First, the T4 is an out-of-order processor with an enhanced branch predictor. Its maximum speed is said to be at least 3GHz, nearly double that of the 1.67GHz T3. Oracle claims the chip's single-threaded performance has been significantly boosted, and expects T4 to deliver a 2x-7x speed increase in single-threaded workloads compared to T3."
Single thread performance (Score:2)
"Oracle claims the chip's single-threaded performance has been significantly boosted"
Be that as it may, the TX chips were designed to handle a vast multitude of threads with lower performance per thread. So now they are trying to turn that design around? Seems to me they are designing the processor equivalent of the half-track.
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Well, it is still 64 threads per socket, or 256 threads per box that that run parallelly. Is that not vast enough? With the 5x signlethread performance compared to the T3?
It may be "vast" enough, but given that 4-8 cores is the most that will typically get used, it may not be *fast* enough, and may be a big waste.
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If you are only using 4-8 cores at a time, you are clearly not the target audience for these chips.
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Actually, they may be - by definition, when a single thread (one out of 8) gets boosted to the high performance mode, it's one per core - so up to 8 *single threaded* applications could be boosted to high performance. Doing this with a single socket is very cool, being able to do this on a per-core basis is even cooler.
given some software company's inability to write efficient multi-threaded code, it gives as close as you can get to the best of both worlds. Some cores doing high perf single thread, othe
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Am I missing something?
Has Sun produced any non-Tn CPU after UltraSPARC IV+ in 2005?
I haven't heard anything about UltraSPARC V - only the T line.
P.S. But probably I shouldn't care anymore. My company recently has just changed the "strategic platform" from Solaris 10 to RHL6.
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Short answer, no. Not really. There is no UltraSPARC V. The 'traditional' SPARC architecture lives on in the M-series, which has SPARC64 CPUs by Fujitsu.
We are jumping from Solaris to RHEL as well. It's possible that we work for the same Canadian ISP, but it's more likely that our companies have made the same decision as dozens of others.
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I was under impression that HP offered us a sweet deal on x64 servers (ProLiants) our management couldn't refuse. And why on earth run a Linux on proprietary hardware?
Old SPARCs would remain of course, but only for purposes of support and maintenance of old versions of our software.
We have bunch of old T2 - and they ... suck. Even on highly multithreaded Java workloads.
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Actually, you can pretty much blame that on Java - it's a disaster on highly parallel gear. (We got Sun to eventually admit that, after a disastrous aborted rollout of Directory Server on T series machines.)
Still - The T machines are very much a niche market, and that niche is disappearing quickly. I suspect there will never be a T5 processor with any significant changes.
Good luck with the ProLiants. They ain't what they used to be, according to a friend recently ex- of HP.
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Good luck with the ProLiants. They ain't what they used to be, according to a friend recently ex- of HP.
They are just generic x64 servers, with a decent support contract from HP. I doubt they are worse or better than the cheap generic Intel boxes from any other manufacturer.
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Fair enough. It's just that up until about three years ago, the Proliants were solid and beautiful tanks, which were almost on par with the new Sun gear at the time.
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HP stopped moving but the rest of the world didn't.
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These days a whitebox with a SuperMicro board is a lot cheaper with more features at the high end. At the low end I don't know why you would bother looking at HP.
HP stopped moving but the rest of the world didn't.
You missed the bit about "decent support contract." We need our suppliers to be able to provide customers with systems which they can support for 5-10 years. Except for the HP, IBM and Sun/Oracle very few companies are doing it.
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Dell of course are several times worse. HP don't really do much support near me.
I got stuff from Racksaver/Verari for a
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The advantage of dealing with a big name comes of being a big player with a big support contract.
Our division within the company runs about 1800 unix servers right now. That doesn't include the switches, the storage, workstations, etc. etc.. That kind of clout gives us traction when we call for support on a system.
If I'm prepared to spend six or seven figures on annual support, then the big companies actually make sense. If I'm looking at a few to a few dozen servers, then no--go with something small, and d
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Actually, you can pretty much blame that on Java - it's a disaster on highly parallel gear.
Do you have references for that? In my experience, Java handles threads mostly well. The last experience I have was on a 16CPU Sun beast (don't remember the model unfortunately). Is that a deficiency of Java on this architecture?
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CPU specification != system architecture.
The former is mostly about wiring a CPU. And instruction set.
The latter is about: memory and memory controllers, IO controller, interrupt controllers, external RTCs, and the rest of carp you usually find soldered on a motherboard. All the carp for which the OS requires a proper driver.
While CPU spec might be free, the rest of the controllers, which are required to bring up the system, are mostly proprietary H/W.
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Redhat dropped SPARC ages ago.
Fine. Slackware for Sparc [splack.org]
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but given that 4-8 cores is the most that will typically get used
You clearly don't understand the target market of these chips. In fact, your statement is hilariously ignorant.
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Unless you happen to have a massively parallel application that needs to serve a huge number of concurrent users. Like, say, a database. Or a web app.
In almost any relational database your bottleneck is going to be storage -- you might be able to process things 32 times as fast, but you're still going to have to wait for that save op to complete before doing anything else. As for web apps, well.. it depends.
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A heavy read database, like a news site, will have nearly everything cached in memory.
I've done ad-hoc aggregate functions against non-indexed tables with over 100mil rows, and they return in sub 10ms times. Cached table data can be fast.
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Terribly small? Most any business who currently uses SPARC would be a target market for these systems. If you consider that small, then I guess we have different opinions on the definition.
The T4 merges the strengths of the T-Series and M-Series together. Looks good to me.
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Re:Single thread performance (Score:5, Interesting)
This comment may have been meant as a bite at Oracle, but it is really a good point. The T4 may be a departure, but that doesn't mean it isn't warranted. The chip is still massively parallel, but it has obviously been refocused. The question is, what does the application need? Perhaps the engineers saw the biggest gains for DB applications in boosting single thread performance. MySQL probably will benefit from the same things that benefit Oracle DB. What are the customer demands for power consumption? Are the tradeoffs balanced? Perhaps lower-power chips require too many servers to store and cool. The T4 still looks like a mighty processor.
Still, if they venture too far into Intel's Xeon space, they will have a hard fight indeed.
-d
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A lot of CPUs in one CPU with low power consumption sounds nice, but that sounds a lot like a GPU setup to me.
Given that GPGPUs are taking over, I smell that they are in need for another problem. My guess is that this powerhouse is seriously going to kick Intel in the balls with Intels failing demonstrations of realtime raytracing.
So where can I get my hands on a Sparc workstation? >:-)
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This is very much a generic CPU, nothing to do with vector processing. It's main tarket is enterprise & communication application servers. Hence the crypto-units and networking capabilities build in. A GPU might well outrun it regarding vector processing though.
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But I'm sorry, no matter how fast you make their F
yo dawg (Score:2)
i heard you like threads, so i put a CPU in your CPU so you could give all your money to Larry Ellsion while you give all your money to Larry Ellison!
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I saw a T4 blade version with 300GB costing around 600 euro's and a terminal costing around 100 euro's, so I figured that a rack/workstation could add up to just around a 1000 dollars. But according to the replies, this is probably impossible to get (1) and worthless for anything that doesn't float (2).
Sadly...
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Correction: Worthless for floating point.
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The T3 has a shared FPU among all those cores. The FP performance is horrible, but it can crank out the int performance required for an efficient web/db server.
Don't expect Ray Tracing with an INT heavy CPU.
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The T1 had a single FPU shared among 8 cores.. The T3 (and T2) has an FPU per core.
Still, your point about ray-tracing is probably valid, compared to other processors available. If I had a heavily threaded application, I would definitely want to look at T-series SPARCs.
Oh... (Score:1)
Well that's nice. Good for Oracle.
Re:high end CPUs from the database company (Score:5, Funny)
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I wish I had mod points, that made me laugh! :D
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No no. You should familiriaze yourself with Oracle DB.
The CPUs are busy colliding on SQL statement cache global lock.
Not the point of SPARC (Score:3, Informative)
Is it me, or did Oracle completely miss the point of SPARC? We used to use SPARCs where I work for huge, multi-thread or child-spawning applications. If you want a number cruncher, go somewhere else. Go buy a POWER CPU. SPARC's shining glory is the massively threaded model where you spawn tons of little instances of the same thing that serve a quick, non-intensive purpose and die. Once again, Oracle is taking something they bought and trying to ram the square object into the round hole they call their business model.
Interestingly enough, the captcha for this was "idiots"
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Another thing which might be worth looking into speeding up is "gettimeofday" and "trigger on event or register/memory=certain value" - I bet there's lots of code which regularly checks "is it time to do X yet?" or "wait till X happens" (e.g. wait for connection or data).
Maybe these aren't that CPU intensive so speeding them up won't help much in performance?
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gettimeofday calls are a problem for several applications. Postgres and MySQL both had to do some changes to lower the number of times they were called to speed up performance. The problem is that open source software is often designed for Linux. gettimeofday is cheap on Linux because they chose to use a less precise timer than other operating systems. I'm not certain how fast it is in Solaris, but I doubt it's a speed demon. This is a software problem though. The best solution is to update a shared m
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Linux is not unusual in seeing developers call gettimeofday/gethrtime with wild abandon, thus slowing the programs they're trying to measure the time of (;-)) For this reason, Solaris time calls are register/location reads, and ethe code sequences are so short that they fit into the the syscall dispatch table. Therefor the caller never really enters the OS at all to get the time.
The interesting new work on locks is "transactional memory", and there's a series of articles about it and Linux memory in gener
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While this might be fine for human facing/usage scenarios, for other scenarios isn't 1 second a very long time for a CPU?
Would delays of 1 millisecond or less be better? Or is there some problem with that? IIRC FreeBSD had some HZ thing, and by default it was 100Hz, so 1 millisecond might be a prob
Re: wait periods (was:Not the point of SPARC) (Score:2)
If I want to let other programs make progress, I'll put myself to sleep for human kinds of time periods, like "the rest of the second" for small waits, 1-3 seconds for big ones, and up to 10 if I can signal the human with something like a watch cursor.
--dave
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Is there a way for a CPU to make mutex handling easier and more efficient?
No. It is inherently expensive operation because the updates to critical section must be propagated between all the CPUs/cores (and their caches). CPU ops for mutex itself are puny, compared to the (invisible) mechanics beneath which guarantees the cache coherency. (More CPUs/cores you have - higher the potential overhead.)
Another thing which might be worth looking into speeding up is "gettimeofday" and "trigger on event or register/memory=certain value" - I bet there's lots of code which regularly checks "is it time to do X yet?" or "wait till X happens" (e.g. wait for connection or data).
`gettimeofday` is already optimized and not a real syscall on Linux and Solaris.
Maybe these aren't that CPU intensive so speeding them up won't help much in performance?
They are CPU intensive - but negligible - because they were already heavily optimized.
Overall, GP's s
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Sometimes. When they are IO bound, then yes, locks are of trivial importance. But DBs generally also serve as massive coherent caches and lock-managers. And those caching operations are VERY susceptible to critical-region code. Namely MySQL INNODB had an inverse performance characteristic with the number of CP
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Is there a way for a CPU to make mutex handling easier and more efficient?
No. Modern CPUs already support waiting for a spinlock without actually using any execution units (which on a highly-parallel CPU like the Tx processors means the time that would be spent executing them can be allocated to another thread) or any memory bandwidth (by monitoring the cache/memory bus for alterations rather than actively polling). Solaris (and I believe other OSs) will quietly decide whether to use a spinlock or a queue-based system for a mutex lock operation depending on whether the thread t
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I don't know about that. alpha/AMD added the 'mesh' CPU network, where you talked to routed neighbors for memory/BUS access, and thus not every CPU needs to spin it's transistors on cache operations. I don't know how advanced that got, but there's no reason that N,S,E,W cache controller nodes can't determine the scope of dissemination of cache-reads, and thereby localize snoop and lock-cache-line calls. Compre-and-set can be implemented IN the cache
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No. Because mutexes as slow (though highly efficient already).
Most architectures of today provide all the necessary tools to implement lockless algorithms which are more complex, but faster. They're less efficient (because they often do a "try and get lucky" style of processing), but if you have a ton of threads and pretty idle CPUs, it's less of an issue.
And support for this comes in the form of memory barriers (read and write - they
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mutex's are VERY efficient with cache-oriented MESI and MOESI instructions, the problem is what you do while another thread owns the mutex. You can either spin-loop or context-switch to another thread. Specifically if thread A locks then has several cache-misses, then thread B would have to spin for thousands of clock-ticks. When you have 80 CPUs that might not be too bad (though it burns power), but if you have 2 CPUs, then that
Re:Not the point of SPARC (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it me, or did Oracle completely miss the point of SPARC? We used to use SPARCs where I work for huge, multi-thread or child-spawning applications. If you want a number cruncher, go somewhere else. Go buy a POWER CPU. SPARC's shining glory is the massively threaded model where you spawn tons of little instances of the same thing that serve a quick, non-intensive purpose and die. Once again, Oracle is taking something they bought and trying to ram the square object into the round hole they call their business model.
Interestingly enough, the captcha for this was "idiots"
Do you really think Oracle could turn the ENTIRE chip engineering boat around in a year and a half? This best-of-both-worlds fast single threaded and massively multithreaded design was probably in the works for YEARS before Sun was bought.
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This chip was probably designed before Oracle finished the takeover of Sun, so saying that Oracle is making this change is quite a leap.
Also the linked article suggests why the design decisions were made in this chip - namely extreme threading compared to the mass market CPUs is getting more and more niche as the mass market CPUs get to 16 threads per socket themselves. Hence this chip going down a higher performance per thread model, with a mode for running a single thread very fast on a core should it nee
Oracle? (Score:1, Insightful)
Oracle is as deep in CPU technology as Berlusconi is deep in reliability.
Maybe it'd read "SUN, an Oracle acquisition, will demo a new T4 Sparc CPU".
Does that make any sense? (Score:3, Insightful)
I mean, to (re)introduce a new CPU in the market?
Either the T4 can run Oracle SQL in silicon or it won't fit in between the Intel/AMD mature technology on one side and the rising (and power saving) ARM on the other one.
Yes, you can build an "Oracle appliance" with whatever CPU you want, even your very own design. But then will the market share justify the efforts in CPU design?
No, I don't think they won't ever succeed.
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No, I don't think they won't ever succeed.
Sooo... You think that they will succeed?
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NO, they won't. Typpo!
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Either the T4 can run Oracle SQL in silicon or it won't fit in between the Intel/AMD mature technology on one side and the rising (and power saving) ARM on the other one.
If you think the T4 is even remotely in the same market as ARM you're only showing your own ignorance. They're more in league with IBM's POWER7 and Intel's high end Xeons, running massive servers.
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I do am ignorant. But I think I know the difference, technical and comemrcial, between Intel, AMD, ARM, POWER7, Alpha and so on.
I simply say, there's no room in the market for another CPU, as almost all of the "atlernative" ones already failed.
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This is not a new CPU trying to squeeze in, this is an upgrade to a CPU that is already in the market!
And if society kept saying "we already have one of those, thank you very much" we'd never make any progress at all.
Re:Does that make any sense? (Score:4, Informative)
# prstat
Total: 341 processes, 9909 lwps, load averages: 20.86, 19.36, 20.41
# prtdiag -v
System Configuration: Sun Microsystems sun4u SPARC Enterprise M9000 Server
System clock frequency: 960 MHz
Memory size: 262144 Megabytes
Only roughly 3 processes per core ... and yes that is 262 GIGA BYTES of Ram. How much again can an ARM address?
Well, keep in mind: when we talk about SPARC or the Power PC architecture we also talk about memory bandwidth, failover safety, attached I/O devices etc.
I don't see anyone trying to build "big iron" with ARMs right now.
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Correct.
Do you why none (else) is building "big iron" like that?
Probabily because too few people is asking for them.
The market buzzwords are "cluster" and "clud". Not "big iron".
I don't mean that real 64bit hardware is not good. I meat it hardly will succeed.
You know the glorious story of the wonderful Motorola 68K and 88K. Beautiful CPUs, stinky business.
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Memory size: 262144 Megabytes ... and yes that is 262 GIGA BYTES of Ram. How much again can an ARM address?
Only roughly 3 processes per core
Just a minor detail, that looks more like 256 "GIGA BYTES".
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No, it looks exactly like 262 GIGABYTE and 256 GIBIBYTE
There's no such thing as a gibibyte no matter how much idiots wish for it.
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Amen to this.
For the basement types x86 desktop guys. While the whimpering noise you make, please visit a Enterprise Class Datacenter of a large organization (if you are allowed inside). An hour downtime of their Operations System would result in couple of million dollar (USD) costs. This is where Sparc and Power PCs run.
Please do not compare your Suzukis with a McLaren F1's. (Its a theoretical argument).
Yes, I have migrated large enterprise Operations Systems from Sparc to x86_64 (Opteron).
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Huh, I am required to have multiple-factor ID access to one of my large global enterprise's datacenters in case the primary admins get hit by a bus or something, and those systems are all running on modern x86 hardware. Most of what you refer to is running on Microsoft OSes, virtualized under Microsoft or VMware servers on Intel hardware. Sure, some of it is Linux, but it's still on x86. The only remaining Sparc servers are being phased out and no longer perform critical functions. They've been replaced wit
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You don't run the sql in silicon to speed things up, you worry about the speed of joins in main memory.
--dave
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Yeah! That's the RDBMS duty! Which is software.
So what'd the be the plus of yet another RISC CPU?
With super-pipelined Intels and AMDs behaving almost like RISC, with multimegabyte L3 caches and so on, the gap between RISC and CISC is almost zero.
Apart of the power hunger.
Mine was humor, anyway. A CPU running SQL in silicon is an absurdity.
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It's a server chip. The massive threading they've got right, and it's great for that, but servers aren't just about running oodles of servlets - although that's a huge part of it. The T4 will doubtless outperform any Intel competitor at the same number of simultaneous threads because Sun has that part of the internals down just right and Intel does not.
The absolutely fastest arrangement Intel has is 4-way SMP, 6-way internal cores, 12 threads per core. (4x6x12) And I do not believe Intel has done any seriou
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price? (Score:2)
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According to the article, apparently they make up for that by charging extra if you want to run Oracle database on an x86 CPU.
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remember, 8 cores, 8 threads per core, multiple chips per system. I'm sure it's able to be LDOM'ed out as well, so you could in theory have up to 256 single-threaded seperate servers running in this one box. Not in the same league as a little dell/HP box. Like someone else said, This is going after IBM P7. Or people who really want to consolidate.
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The thing I don't understand is: If you have code which are multit-hreaded enough to max out a T3, then the T4 will not give you any performance benefit. This is odd, considering how old the T3 is.
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Great for servers, bad for clusters. Very power efficient, but very picky on the type of work they do. Very expensive, but worth it if you need high densities.
Semi-niche market.
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Will it run Linux?
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No, but it runs FreeBSD
Pricing? No, *licensing* (Score:3)
It's all very nice that they've decided to try and up the single-thread performance. However, it's worth noting that the only thing worthwhile to run on a SPARC nowadays (thanks to Oracle's PMITA licensing structure) is Oracle DB. You buy an Oracle box to run Oracle. Any other workload is nonsensical, as you'll get better single-thread performance from x86, and you'll get way more cycles per dollar from... well, just about any other hardware/OS combination out there.
So as you consider purchasing this higher-clocked box, I've been told that the Oracle licensing for this machine will be 0.5 per core, while the T3 is 0.25 per core. Basically Oracle will cost approximately twice as much per core on this machine. I'm not a DBA... does that make any sense, when databases are traditionally I/O-bound?
Incidentally, my first paragraph caused me pain to type... I'm my organization's SPARC and Solaris expert, and I was a big pusher of the platform. Oracle's takeover and subsequent psychotic support costs and absolute blindness to any workload not DB-oriented was a fair kick in the pants to me. I'll fully admit that I'm not impartial.
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The matter with traditions is that they are outdated at some point. DBs are no longer I/O-bound since typical querries return gigabytes of results that need to be joined and ordered. At least in our days universities have research projects running to utilize the CPU better in modern DBs.
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I'm with you and am a big supporter of Solaris and Sun but the Oracle licensing costs were killing the company and killing me since I couldn't get new Sun boxes to replace the old gear. Hence the move to Dell and HP and the transition to mysql for the database side (although when Oracle bought Sun, it threw a bit of a wrench into the works).
[John]
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Got me. I'm in operations, not in development.
[John]
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So you would prefer that they had 16 of the T3 cores at 0.25x per core? Running at maybe 2GHz each because of the design?
Nah, 8 T4 cores at 0.5x per core, and far greater per-core performance, seems to be a better deal to me. You might lose half of your threads per CPU, but as the article says, that level of threading is getting more and more niche.
But not as good a deal as not using Oracle in the first place.
Cores? (Score:2)
Considering the licenses are for the number of cores, changing the number of cores from 16, or 32, or 256 to 8 cores would certainly bring the Oracle DB license costs down again. And since that's the reason we haven't been upgrading our Sun systems and have been moving to Dell R710's or HP, there might be some strategy involved from Sun (since this couldn't have been something that took a bit over a years to produce).
[John]
I'm not dead yet (Score:2)
Really, I'm feeling quite a bit better.
It would be nice to see sun rise again; although masters of their own demise, they have suffered the way Brittany did.