At last, theSPARC T5servers are announced! They are worthy heirs of the SPARC T-series, and even more powerful than their successful predecessors the SPARC T4.
Before we'd go into the technical details, here is a very important message:
Having announced the T5 servers doesn't make the T4s go away. It is not a platform replacing technology, but a platformextending one! Oracle is going to offer SPARC T4 and T5 servers side-by-side!
Having said that, let's dive headfirst into the details to soothe the techcrave:
What's new with the SPARC T5 servers?
- The more obvious updates:
- One CPU has 16 cores
- The cores run at 3.6GHz
- Servers with up to 8 sockets
- that is, up to 1024 parallell threads in a box!!
- 8 sockets wiht glueless interconnect, mind you, no interim hops between the sockets!
- up to 4TB memory per server
- More detailed information:
- Cache doubled to from the T4's 4MB to 8MB L3 cache
- PCIe Slots upgraded to PCIe 3.0 doubling throughput of I/O
- CPU Modules are hot-pluggable on the T5-4 and T5-8 servers
- Crypto performance ismore than double to that of a T4
- The T5 is using the 28nm technology (T4 was built with 40nm)
- Advanced Power Management
- T4 had ExpressModule PCIe, T5 has standard lowprofile PCIe Slots
- We sticked to the many T-Server goodies though:
- OVM for SPARC (aka Logical Domains, the possibility to partition the T-SPARC servers to several virtual machines running completely independent Solaris installations/versions)
- HW Cryptoengine (encrypt your DataBase data, ZFS filesystems, SSL, support your iSCSI traffic with HW-implemented algorithms)
- Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 support
- The CPU Cores are the S3 cores we learned to appreciate in the T4s
- OnChip PCIe controllers
- Out-of-Order, dual-issue instructions
Oracle has released 1-, 2-, 4- and 8 Socket servers, the T5-1B (blade form factor), the T5-2, the T5-4 and the T5-8. These have been delivered as per the SPARC Roadmap, which Oracle has committed to not to deliver later than defined.
These expand the range of the SPARC T-servers, starting with 4-core Netra SPARC T4-1 all the way up to 128 cores SPARC T5-8.
These are the servers you are looking for, may the force be with us to feed these massively parallell enterprise beasts.
Questions? Do ask! Like:
Q: You didn't mention yet the M5...?
A: I didn't dare to put too much awesome into one single post. Allow me to come back and report in another one :) Yes, it has up to 32 Sockets, 1536 parallelly running threads, and up to 32 TB RAM. Yes it runs Hard Partitions, LDoms, Solaris 10 and 11 :)