SPARC M8 Processors Launched

[uid313]

Probably a great CPU. But not anything anyone is going to invest in since SPARC and Solaris is dead.

[torsionbar28]

Probably a great CPU. But not anything anyone is going to invest in since SPARC and Solaris is dead.

Not many new customers certainly (hence the recent layoffs), but plenty of existing customers who are looking for an upgrade. The cost of a new SPARC M8 server is lower in most cases than the labor cost and re-training cost of moving to a whole new platform. As a data point, my employer bought $500k of HP Itanium servers even knowing they're a dead end, because it's a drop-in upgrade for our older production HP-UX systems. We're steadily migrating our apps to RHEL/x86 but that process takes years, and we need modern vendor supported servers in the meantime, hence the $500k Itanium purchase. I.e. it's a stop-gap measure.

[cjcox]

Not many new customers certainly (hence the recent layoffs), but plenty of existing customers who are looking for an upgrade. The cost of a new SPARC M8 server is lower in most cases than the labor cost and re-training cost of moving to a whole new platform. As a data point, my employer bought $500k of HP Itanium servers even knowing they're a dead end, because it's a drop-in upgrade for our older production HP-UX systems. We're steadily migrating our apps to RHEL/x86 but that process takes years, and we need modern vendor supported servers in the meantime, hence the $500k Itanium purchase. I.e. it's a stop-gap measure.

But the cost of "staying put" in the face of the inevitable can have near infinite costs associated with it. So, "stop-gap", but only in very very emergency situations and only with a very very short term view (like 6 mos.).

I say 6mos., because it's very unlikely that migration would take years unless everything is written in SPARC assembler.

[lem79]

THANK YOU AMD FOR FORCING ORACLE TO DESIGN AND RELEASE THESE PARTS FROM SCRATCH IN APPROXIMATELY 90 DAYS!

Oh wait.

Chuck, you're so bitter lately. Ryzen is awesome, enjoy the fun and competition. Even if perceptions of Ryzen are better than reality, AMD needs that to gain momentum and market/mind share. It's only going to be good for everyone in the long run.

[andyprough]

Probably a great CPU. But not anything anyone is going to invest in since SPARC and Solaris is dead.

Apparently it's "2X faster" than everything else that's ever existed previously. I'm thinking of buying one and strapping it to my old Ford pickup truck - SPARC should make it 2X faster - i.e. turn it into a Ferrari.

[k1e0x]

If you want Solaris, you buy a SPARC machine from Oracle. If you want AIX, you buy a POWER from IBM. If you want HP-UX, you buy an Itanium from HP. The chip cost is not relevant at all, and is barely a drop in the bucket compared to the total platform cost and the vendor support contract. These are not tinkertoy peecee's for grandma to check her AOL email.

Sorta, Solaris was ported to x86 in what.. 2000? Potentially Solaris could be deployed new now (tho there are good alternatives see below) but yes AIX and HP-UX are dead for new deployments yet still in use the industry (phone companies are big users here, I think even VMS is as well) and instead of replacing the platform when hardware dies you can just throw new hardware at it. I'd be nice to see FreeBSD or Illumos pick up some of these customers but at least in Illumos' case you'd need someone to start building a CentOS type distro with it. Due to that not sure a new Sparc chip would even sell now or if Oracle could even continue to design them with the quality that Sun did.

[lejeczek]

I guess a question that rises naturally is - does Oracle Linux run off it? And whether GCC toll kit(or any opensource complier) optimizes for those CPUs?

[L_A_G]

Performance looks to be pretty nice for the applications it's intended for, but I'm not sure anyone in their right mind would go for these rather than the inevitable switch to x86 or ARM servers anyone using SPARC servers is going to have to go trough sooner or later. We're talking about a literal dead end architecture here, thou not because there isn't any room for improvement, but because ORACLE decided to kill any future development, so the indefinite support situation a lot of old school Cobol-running mainframes isn't going to happen here.

[Zucca]

Michael should use some magic and get one M8 workstation and benchmark it. :P

256 threads @ 5GHz sounds crazy.

[monraaf]

> I guess a question that rises naturally is - does Oracle Linux run off it? And whether GCC toll kit(or any opensource complier) optimizes for those CPUs?

Yes, it does:

> https://oss.oracle.com/projects/linux-sparc/
> http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/se...c-3665558.html