14 DAY TRIAL // Oracle has announced that it has made a major move on the server market, namely the release of a server processor that has a full 16 cores which has already been used in the creation of a whole new range of servers at least twice as powerful as their predecessors.
Apparently, Advanced Micro Devices isn't the only company that thinks increasing the number of CPU cores is what servers need.
In fact, Oracle has actually developed a new SPARC processor that has 16 cores and no less than eight threads for each one, leading to 128 simultaneous threads for each CPU in a server.
These chips also feature a L2 cache memory of 6MB which, though it may have its hands full with the massive parallelism, contributes to the throughput and I/O performance boost.
Simply put, Oracle claims that its new CPU can deliver twice as wide an I/O bandwidth and twice the throughput compared to previous-generation processors.
For those interested in numbers, the 16 V9 cores of the 40nm-based chips each have a clock speed of 1.65 GHz.
This CPU has already been made part of a number of new servers, not just single-socket but also two-socket and four-socket versions.
The single-socket T3-1 is available in a two server-rack unit (2U), while the two-socket and four-socket servers come in 3U and 5U versions.
“Oracle’s SPARC product line is the cornerstone of our strategy to deliver customers a complete, open and integrated apps-to-disk solution,” said John Fowler, executive vice president, Server and Storage Systems, Oracle.
“These new SPARC T3 systems deliver on our commitment to provide customers with a 2x increase in performance every two years and deliver massive scalability for high compute environments like cloud computing,” he added.
The first oracle SPART T3-powered servers should start shipping sometime during the next 30 days.