The new SPARC T5 chip uses the "S3" core which has been in the SPARC T4 generation for over a year. That core offers, among other things, 8 hardware threads, two simultaneous integer pipelines, and some other compute units as well (FP, crypto, etc.). The S3 core also includes the instructions necessary to work with the SPARC hypervisor that implements SPARC virtual machines (Oracle VM Server for SPARC, previously called Logical Domains or LDoms) including Live Migration of VMs.
However, four significant improvements have been made in the new systems:
- 16 cores on each T5 chip, instead of T4's 8 cores per chip, was made possible because of a die shrink (to 28 nm).
- An increase in clock rate to 3.6 GHz yields an immediate 20% improvement in processing over T4 systems.
- Increased chip scalability allows up to 8 CPU chips per system, doubling the maximum number of cores in the mid-range systems.
- In addition to the mid-range servers, now the high-end M5-32 also supports OVM Server for SPARC (LDoms), while maintaining the ability to use hard partitions (Dynamic Domains) in that system. (The T5-based servers (PDF) also have LDoms, just like the T4-based systems.)
The result of those is the "world's fastest microprocessor." Between the four T5 (mid-range) systems and the M5-32, this new generation of systems has already achieved 17 performance world records.
Some of the simpler comparisons that were made yesterday include (see thepress release for substantiation):
- An Oracle T5-8 (8 CPU sockets) runningSolaris has a higher SAP performanace rating than an IBM Power 780 (8 sockets) running AIX.
- A single, 2-socket T5-2 has three times the performance, at 13% of the cost, of two Power 770's - on a JD Edwards performance test.
- Two T5-2 servers have almost double the Siebel performance of two Power 750 servers - at one-fourth the price.
- One 8-processor T5-8 outperforms an 8-processor Power 780 - at one-seventh the cost - on the common SPECint_rate 2006 benchmark.
The new high-end SPARC system - the M5-32 - sports 192 cores (1,536 hardware threads) of compute power. It can also be packed with 32 TB (yes, terabytes!) of RAM. Put your largest DB entirely in RAM, and see how fast it goes!
Oracle has refreshed its entire SPARC server line all at once, greatly improving performance - not only compared to the previous SPARC generation, but also compared to the current generation of servers from other manufacturers.