Webcast available and SPARC roadmap

The webcast is now available at Oracles website

While the presentation for the future SPARC roadmap stretched to 2015 a few things in the next year or so caught my attention. First a CPU with double throughput will be delivered this year. This is obviously the UltraSPARC T3 with double amount of cores than the current generation of T-processors, the UltraSPARC T2. Early next year the M-Series SPARC64 processors will get some additional speed, probably with slightly higher clock-frequency. But next year is when it gets interesting, they plan to deliver three times the single-thread performance in a new generation of T-processors! It must be a whole new core in this chip since the current, more simple cores would have to be clocked far over 4GHz to achieve this. Looking into 2012 a new generation of M-servers are planned, with 8-64 cores, providing 6x the throughput and 1.5x the single-thread performance. The roadmap goes on until 2015 with several times the performance for both T and M series of servers, but we will hopefully have plenty of time to get back to that in the next years.

All this sound good, but the thing I would look forward to the most is the 3x boost of single-thread performance for T-servers, making it possible to use LDOM technology for a much wider range of workloads. By that time we should also have live migration of LDOMs between T-servers available.

I would love to dig deeper into the details in this but it's my last days of vacation and I have an early flight tomorrow morning.

Oracle Systems Strategy Update Fowler