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."
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