Items tagged with SPARC
Oracle is launching a new set of SPARC processors it hopes will staunch its market share losses, even as revenue continues to slip. The new T5 chips are built on a 2nm process and refine the T4 core that Oracle debuted two years ago. Like the T4, the T5 emphasized improving single-thread performance and clock speeds, though the new core does double the number of cores per processor to 16, up from eight. The SPARC T series from Sun/Oracle has always interested me, because it's an explicitly multi-threaded design that emphasized parallelism. After Intel announced the end of single-threaded scaling in 2005, Sun's early T1 processors flipped entirely in the opposite direction, emphasizing multi-threaded...
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HP and Oracle have been slugging it out in court over the future of Intel's Itanium for months now. HP has just widened the front by asking the EU to investigate whether Oracle acted improperly when it terminated support for Intel's Itanium. HP claims that Oracle is improperly leveraging its software market to compel purchases of its own hardware, while Oracle maintains that Itanium is essentially a zombie chip. Just the Facts HP sued Oracle after the software company announced it would stop building software for Itanium. According to Bill Wohl, HP's chief communications officer, the two companies share ~140,000 customers. The lawsuit is an attempt to enforce what HP believes are contractual...
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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. Sun's T1 processor, codenamed Niagara and introduced in 2005, rejected a conventional focus on single-thread performance in favor of an aggressively multi-threaded, multi-core approach. CPU clock speeds were purposefully kept low to minimize power consumption. The Niagara T1, introduced in 2005 The T1, which was introduced in 2005, ran at a maximum of 1.4GHz and offered a maximum of eight cores, with each core capable of handling four threads for a total of 32 threads. The T3, released last year, is clocked at up to 1.67GHz,...
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The x86 architecture has increasingly dominated the server market over the past decade but there's still a market for mainframe, big-iron servers. At present, Intel has challenged old guards Sun and IBM with a mixture of Nehalem-based Xeons and Itanium processors with the octal-core Nehalem-EX waiting in the wings. IBM isn't waiting for Nehalem-EX or Intel's new Itanium processor to hit the market before taking action of its own; Big Blue launched its POWER7 architecture on Monday. At 567mm2 and 32MB of on-die L3 cache, the new CPU is something of a beast. Each POWER7 chip is divided into eight cores each with its own L2 cache. Each core is capable of handling four threads for a total of 32 threads...
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