SPARC T4 information and Beta program

Oracle have announced an beta program för the upcoming SPARC T4 processor which Oracle perviously have disclosed should provide three to five times the single thread performance of current T3 systems.

"The aim here was to develop a processor core that would provide high-speed, single-thread performance while also addressing the needs of applications that benefit from the high efficiency and throughput of multithreaded cores. The SPARC T4 is up to five times faster than the SPARC T3 for single-threaded functions," says Rick Hetherington, vice president of hardware development at Oracle. "It's breakthrough technology for us."

This in combination with on-chip crypto acceleration, massive thread count and LDOM capability it looks like it will be the most interesting SPARC processor since the never released UltraSparc RK, Rock.

The new processor will also dedicate cores to critical software thread with a new Solaris API:
"The new systems use "critical thread API", or the ability of the Solaris operating system to recognize critical threads in applications and assign them, by themselves, to a single processor core. This allows the critical threads to run at the very highest performance levels without competing with other less critical threads. This delivers faster overall performance by accelerating the more critical components in threaded applications. "

Hopefully these advancements, at least in combination, will deliver broader on the T2/T3 promise of massive throughput without sacrificing or be limited by single thread performance. This would then make the T4 a very suitable general purpose processor with the advantages of handling massive amounts of load.

Be the First to Test Next-Gen SPARC Systems
Conversations with Oracle Innovators, Rick Hetherington
What's Inside the New SPARC T-Series Processors?
Oracle SPARC roadmap