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."
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.
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.