Solaris 10 10/12 and T5-8

Oracle keeps quiet about upcoming Solaris release and their features. I've however figured out the name (and planned release month) for the possibly last Solaris 10 update. It seems like s10u11 will be named Solaris 10 10/12 indicating a October release.

Not much is known about this release more than that it will probably feature a ZFS tech refresh, fully integrate OCM and live upgrade enhancements. It could possibly also support the new T5 processors since they might be quite similar to the current T4 processors except for the doubling of cores.

I have also seen fragments of information indicating that Oracle was running Solaris 11 Update 1 on SPARC T5-8 machines as early as March.

Upcoming SPARC CPUs

The upcoming Hot Chips symposiums "Big iron" session will feature two future SPARC processors:

"SPARC64 X; Fujitsu’s new generation 16 core processor for the next generation UNIX servers

16-core SPARC T5 CMT Processor with glueless 1-hop scaling to 8-sockets"

The SPARC T5 is expected to be built using 28nm technology and double the number of cores compared to the current T4 processor. The Sun Oracle server line should also include a 8 processor version, T5-8 which will then be have four times the number of cores (128) compared to the current T4-4 (32).

This session will be held August 29, hopefully more information will surface afterwards. Otherwise it would be a safe bet to say that we will know more about the SPARC T5 after Oracle OpenWorld in October.

The Register has an article about both the T5 and the M4: Drilling into Oracle's performance boasts.