UPDATED 15:36 EDT / OCTOBER 26 2015

Oracle Founder Larry Ellison NEWS

Oracle debuts first systems with 10-billion-transistor SPARC M7 chip

Oracle Corp. certainly knows how to launch a hardware product. The company introduced its newest line of SPARC-based systems at its annual customer conference this morning with a list of more than 20 broken processing records spanning roughly half a dozen workload categories from data analytics to bespoke customer applications.

The credit goes to the new SPARC M7 chip inside, which packs up to 32 cores each capable of supporting eight threads and provides a hefty 64 megabytes of onboard cache to go along in which data is stored before processing to reduce ingestion times. That adds up to over 10 billion transistors that the systems rolling out today exploit to the fullest.

The star of the launch is the new M-Series, which allows organizations to cram up to 16 of the chips into a single chassis for a total of 512 cores that can handle as many as 4,096 concurrent threads, enough to support even the largest Oracle Database deployments. And that’s not even counting the onboard coprocessors.

On each side of the M7 die next to the cache is a bit of silicon purpose-built to handle a specific data management operation such as combining tables, filtering information or decompressing a file. These coprocessors offload that work from the main cores to shrink the queue for other tasks, which Oracle says can improve the performance increase of its relational store up to tenfold in certain scenarios.

The whole process is performed securely thanks to access validation functionality likewise built directly into the chip that allows developers to mark certain portions of the onboard cache with a special sequence of bits acting as a password. Applications have to input the code every time they attempt to read or write data at that location as a result in order to confirm their legitimacy.

That makes it much more difficult for malware to access the records organizations store in their Oracle Database deployments, or any other workload running on the M7 for that matter. Further tightening the perimeter is a cryptography feature individually implemented in each core that keeps application data encrypted at all times, even while they’re moving from one server to another.

The new M-Series machines share that functionality with the new T-Series rolling out in conjunction, which make the processor available at a more accessible price point. The models in the lineup pack between one and four M7 chips to support virtualized workloads that don’t require the same chip density as a database and can be conveniently spread out across multiple nodes. 


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