Oracle claims performance crown with SPARC processor

Oracle this morning launched the SPARC T5 processor and servers based on it which the company says are the fastest machines currently in the world.

Larry Ellison unveils the T5. Source: Oracle

The new SPARC T5 is fabricated with 28nm lithography and runs at 3.6 GHz with 16 cores. Thanks to the four DDR-3 memory controllers being integrated on the processor die, the T5 provides up to 80 gigabytes per second bandwidth. 

Three new T5 servers with two, four and eight processor sockets were launched by Ellison, as well as two 16 and 32 socket mainframes.

According to Ellison, the T5-8 processor is five times faster with applications than the previous generation T4-4 and provides better integer performance than the IBM Power CPU. A US$620,000 T5-8 server managed over 8.5 million transactions per minute in Oracle testing, Ellison said.

In SAP's SD standard application benchmarking performed on March 15 this year, a SPARC T-5 based M5-32 server processed over 9.4 million line items and more than 28 million dialog steps per hour, with 85,050 users and an average response time of 0.80 seconds.

The M5-32 SPARC server in the test featured 32 processors running at 3.6GHz with 192 cores and a total of 1536 threads and 32 terabytes of RAM. It ran Oracle's 11g RDBMS on the Solaris 11 operating system.

Ellison envisions database and Java functions to move from software to silicon, to further accelerate performance. He said it can be done, as for instance encryption is now done in hardware.

Oracle bought Sun Microsystems in 2009. Sun originally developed the reduced instruction set computing SPARC processor, along with the Solaris UNIX-based operating system.