Oracle Announces Sparc M7 Processor with 32 Cores

Oracle has announced a family of Sparc systems with the Sparc M7 processor. The chips with 32 cores and 256 threads per chip are equipped with Oracle database accelerators and Security in Silicon. The Sparc T7 and M7 servers are available immediately.

The systems, including intrusion protection and encryption and sql-in-silicon, were already announced last year. In August this year, Oracle already released a Sonoma chip based on the Sparc M7 and now with server systems with the new Sparc M7, Oracle reports in a message around the Oracle Openworld 2015 conference.

The M7 and T7 servers are equipped with silicon secured memory, which keeps track of which data enters the memory in real time. This would increase protection against erroneous or malicious code. Silicon secured memory is used by default by Oracle Database 12c and can also be configured for existing applications.

Encryption capabilities are built into all cores of the processors through hardware-assisted encryption. Among other things, use can be made of aes, des or sha encryption. Existing applications that use encryption would also be accelerated by the possibilities.

With sql-in-silicon functionality is added to the cores of the chips via co-processors. This should ensure faster processing of database-related actions. Features that will be accelerated, according to Oracle, include memory compression, memory and range scan, filtering and joint assist. Because the co-processors perform these functions, the efficiency of the different cores is increased and the memory usage is reduced.

The Sparc M7 processors have 32 cores and run at 4.13GHz with 8 threads per core or 256 threads in total. Each processor has three cache levels, from 16KB on level 1 to 64MB on level 3. The chip natively supports 15 different cryptographic algorithms: AES, Camellia, CRC32c, DES, 3DES, DH, DSA, ECC, MD5, RSA, and SHA -1, -224, -256, -384 and -512. The SuperCluster M7 and Sparc M7 servers are available immediately.