14 DAY TRIAL // Lately most of the developments that have been taking place in processor design have concentrated on increasing the number of available cores, but Oracle is set to challenge this trend with its future Sparc T4 processor, the company just announcing it has cut in half the number of cores available on the T4 choosing to focus on single threaded performance instead.
As a result of this decision, the upcoming T4 will come with only 8 cores down from the 16 found in the Sparc T3 CPU that was released by Oracle just a few months ago.
According to Fudzilla, this decision was taken in order to build a processor that is better suited at running big databases and ERP applications, this type of workloads requiring strong single threaded performance.
As database applications are Oracle's core business, the company wishes to improve the single threaded performance of the T4, this requiring larger amounts of high-speed cache memory to be used inside the T4 in order to make this processor a lot more balanced for running all sort of applications.
The increased cache memory will most certainly take up added room in the processor's die, thus forcing Oracle to reduce the number of cores available.
However, users that run highly parallel workloads will still be able to go for the T3 processor, Oracle also planning to increase the number of sockets available in its servers.
This would mean that sometime in 2013 users will be able to get eight-socket Sparc-based systems, Oracle planning to release solutions with up to 64 sockets in 2014, up from the four sockets per system available today.
Unfortunately, this is all the information available for now as Oracle still hasn't made anything public regarding their timeframe for launching these new T4 chips, although some sources say these will be available sometimes next year.