SPARC T5, M4 and SPARC64-X

Short summary of SPARC processor information that was disclosed at Oracle world, in the near future Oracle will release two different SPARC processors and Fujitsu will release a new SPARC64 processor with support for LDOM.

SPARC T5 (early next year)

• 16 Cores 128 threads 
• 28nm 
• 25% increased thread performance to T4 
• 2.5x throughput compared to T4 
• Scales from 1 to 8 processors 
• PCIe Gen 3 
• 8MB L3 cache
• LDOM virtualization (as with all previous T-series)
• Solaris 10 update 11 or Solaris 11.1

SPARC M4 (next year)

• 6 cores 48 threads 
• Scales to 32+ sockets 
• 48MB L2 cache 
• 28nm 
• 3.6GHz 
• 5-6x performance per socket compared to M-series 
• LDOM virtualization
• 32TB+ memory configurations
• Solaris 11 only (but S10 support in LDOM)

SPARC64-X

• LDOM virtualization 
• 16 cores 32 threads 
• 24MB L2 Cache 
• 3 GHz 
• On Chip  DB floating point 
• Crypto acceleration 
• Runs both S10 and S11 in lab

Oaktable world and OpenWorld 2012

I am attending both Oracle OpenWorld an ZFS Day/Oaktable world and will post updates as soon as I get some spare time or at the latest early next week.

It was great to talk and listen to the Joyent/Nexenta/illumos guys at Oaktable world.

Oaktable world
Oracle OpenWorld

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.

SPARC presentations from OOW

The presentations from OOW are now online, two are very interesting from a SPARC perspective. One of them is a somewhat deeper technical review of the new SPARC T4. The second states that the next generation M-systems are currently being tested together with the 28nm 16-core T5 that testing should start this October and they have marked that processor as being delivered "early".

Since there should be few differences between a T4 and T5 besides the 28nm shrink, double the cores and possibly a frequency bump it seems like it could be possible squeeze the time to market for that design. (With few differences I mean that the core itself is ready)

Next Generation SPARC Processor, An In-Depth Technical Review
SPARC Strategy

More news from OOW 2011

Another quick update of things I've found out so far, I will write more when I find some spare time:

• There will be a Solaris 11 release event the 9th of November
• The final Solaris 11 release should be based on build snv_175
• The next version of OpCenter (12C) will be able to manage existing zones (brown field)
• The next update of Solaris 10 (in 2012) will be the last Solaris 10 update
• Solaris developers claimed that part of the reason for not supporting older sun4u machines was due to the way cache was handled which was not optimal.
• While Solaris 10 supports the SPARC T4 you will get optimal performance using Solaris 11 since some changes could not be backported.

Solaris 11 Launch Event Webcast

First days of OOW

A quick summary of he most interesting news from the first days of Oracle Open World that are related to Solaris/SPARC.

• Solaris 11 is slightly ahead of schedule, it was supposed to be released by the end of the year.

• OpCenter is now included in your support contract for no additional cost, including virtualization!

• A new Oracle VM for SPARC will be release (3.0) that supports live migration between processors with diffent clock frequency and even between T2 and T3.

• Future releases of Oracle VM for SPARC will try to remove limitations, for example enable live migration while using dedicated PCI hardware in guest domans.

• Some work on Solaris 12 have already been started

• Solaris 11 will have more focus on virtualization/cloud

• SPARC super cluster will support exadata instances (one per T4-4)

Now i'm of to a new session, a deep technical review of the SPARC T4.

OpenWorld and Solaris reunion

I'm going to San Francisco and Oracle OpenWorld now. In the coming week will dig into the details of Solaris 11 and the new SPARC T4 processor among other things. Mark Hurd will probably deliver an updated roadmap for Solaris and SPARC, perhaps we will even get some kind of confirmation on the release date of Solaris 11.

Joyent will also host a Solaris family reunion event on tuesday:

"There’s been a lot of news in the past few months about the progeny of Solaris: Illumos, SmartOS, OpenIndiana, and the forthcoming Oracle Solaris 11. Since many of our old friends/colleagues will be in town for Oracle Open World, we of the Illumos / SmartOS / OI community thought it would be a nice opportunity to get together, hoist a few beers, talk about old times, and maybe share our visions of the future."

Solaris family reunion
Oracle OpenWorld

IDG SPARC T4 article

A interesting article about the upcoming SPARC T4 is available from IDG but only with an subscription. The article is also available in text form on a Danish Oracle blog.

Excerpts from the article:
"The new T4 processor, running at 3GHz or more, has features that will also allow T4-based systems to take on some workloads that today are going to Intel Xeon processors, which today perform faster on single-thread workloads than do the T3- series of SPARC processors."

"At the Hot Chips 2011 conference, an IEEE technical conference held at Stanford University from August 17-19, 2011, Oracle systems engineers described the top features of the new T4 processors, including a 16-stage integer instruction pipeline and enhanced cryptographic performance. Among the business benefits associated with the new design will be: double the amount of per-thread throughput performance, compared to T3 – and a range of 2 to 7 times more single-thread performance for business workloads than T3 processors. Given the binary-compatibility of T3 and T4, this means that the same Oracle Solaris applications that have been running on T3 will see considerable speedup on T4, without recompilation."

Nyt om næste generation SPARC T-series
(Only a short introduction in Danish, article in English)

Solaris updates in 2012

In the Solaris online forum last week there where refereces to another scheduled Solaris 10 update, update 11 (s10u11), schedule for release the second half of 2012.

There where no other information regarding the release but it's good to see that Solaris 10 will continue to be updated a while after Solaris 11 have been released.

The scheduled also included the expected Solaris 10 8/11 release and the Solaris 11 release which probably will be available at Oracle World 2011. There was also an update scheduled for Solaris 11 the first half of 2012.

Update: You can look at the roadmap here.

Two Solaris releases for the T4 in 2011?

Solaris 11 is not the only Solaris release we can expect to see in 2011. The next update of Solaris 10, update 10 or Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 which seems to be what Oracle are aiming for in both name and release date is also coming in 2011. Earlier posts have included some of the expected content but the name and release window recently surfaced.

I found this in a publicly available bug report:

                Oracle Solaris 10 8/11 s10x_u10wos_02 X86
Copyright(c) 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.
                    Assembled 22 November 2010
     Early Access Build for Evaluation and Test Purposes Only.
         NOT SUPPORTED FOR PRODUCTION USE.  Not patchable.

With the 8/11 target it seems that Oracle wants to release the update in time before Oracle World 2011, perhaps to have a new Solaris release to talk about in the sessions but it also seem likely that it will support the upcoming SPARC T4 (Yosemite Falls) processor that could be launched at the same time ( Oracles road maps have pointed to the second half of 2011 and Rick Hetherington stated in the recent interview that it was less than 12 month away ).

Another interesting thing is that in the Oracle roadmap, Solaris 11 was plotted at the same time as the SPARC T4, sometime in the second half of 2011. Could this mean both Solaris 11 and Solaris 10 8/11 will be released at the same time and at Oracle world 2011? Given all the announcement at last Oracle world it would make sense.

Take a look at the slides of John Fowler, Executive Vice President of Systems, page 8 for the roadmap.

This gives some more substance to Fowlers statement that they will continue to produce Solaris 10 updates for some time, the timeframe for the release was probably not very hard to guess but it is interesting that there now seems to be a preliminary name. It looks like next year will be an interesting year for both Solaris and SPARC.

Here is some information on some of the expected content of the update:
Solaris 10 update 10 update