Oracle announces relatively small and frugal Sparc processor ‘Sonoma’

At the Hot Chips conference, Oracle announced a small, fuel-efficient and cheaper variant of the Sparc M7 processor called Sonoma. The octacore with integrated Infiniband support is intended for scalable enterprise clusters.

The 20nm Sonoma chip is based on the design of the Sparc M7, the bulky chip with 32 cores that Oracle announced last year and that is due to appear this year. However, the size is considerably smaller and Oracle has opted for extensive integration. This should lead to lower latency, consumption and costs and Sonoma should therefore be scalable for enterprise clusters and cloud services.

Sonoma has eight cores, divided into two clusters, and can handle 64 threads. Each cluster contains 8MB L3 cache, 256KB L2 instruction cache, and two 246KB L2 data caches. In addition, there is 16KB L1I + 16KB L1D cache per core. There are also two DDR4 memory controllers that can address a total of four 2133/2400 channels. The memory bandwidth peaks at 77GB/s. In addition, Sonoma features two integrated InfiniBand links for a bidirectional bandwidth of 28GB/s and there are two PCI-e 3.0 links.

Oracle has provided Sonoma with Database Accelerators, or DAXs, to significantly accelerate analytics applications for Oracle databases. The accelerators can handle both compressed and uncompressed formats, and applications can deliver work through the hypervisor API and synchronize over shared memory.

When exactly the chip will be available and at what price is not yet known.