SPARC M8 Processors Launched

Written by Michael Larabel in Oracle on 18 September 2017 at 01:28 PM EDT. 25 Comments
ORACLE
While Oracle recently let go of some of their SPARC team, today marks the launch of the SPARC M8.

The initial SPARC M8 line-up includes the T8-1, T8-2, T8-4. M8-8, and SuperCluster M8-8 servers.

Oracle claims of SPARC M8, "The SPARC M8 processor offers security enhancements delivering 2x faster encryption and 2x faster hashing than x86 and 2x faster than SPARC M7 microprocessors. The SPARC M8 processor's unique design also provides always-on security by default and built-in protection of in-memory data structures from hacks and programming errors. SPARC M8's silicon innovation provides new levels of performance and efficiency across all workloads."

Database workloads are said to be 2x faster per-core than x86, 1.4x faster database performance than M7, up to 7x faster database analytics than x8, 2x better Java performance than x86, 1.3x better performance than SPARC M7, and 7x queries per minute per core than x86 for database analytics.

SPARC M8 is supported by Solaris and presumably should work as well with the latest Linux kernel.

Per-socket, Oracle's SPARC M8 processor can support up to 32 cores and each core can yield eight threads to allow 256 threads per processor. The M8 is still built on older 20nm manufacturing tech, but they are claiming clock speeds up to 5.0GHz.

More details via today's press release and SPARC server page.
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