SPARC M8 Processors Launched

[phoronix]

Phoronix: SPARC M8 Processors Launched

While Oracle recently let go of some of their SPARC team, today marks the launch of the SPARC M8...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=SPARC-M8-Launched

[chuckula]

THANK YOU AMD FOR FORCING ORACLE TO DESIGN AND RELEASE THESE PARTS FROM SCRATCH IN APPROXIMATELY 90 DAYS!

Oh wait.

[Nille]

And coast probably 4 times of an x86

[jrch2k8]

And coast probably 4 times of an x86

probably a lot more than 4x, SPARC always has been tied to certain product as a whole platform and some lower models for sales and press, so adding license code and other items for a SPARC system, we may be walking between 100k to 200k$ for the barely bare metal version.

[cb88]

Not really you can easily spec a 64 core (and half the threads of an m8) EPYC system up to 50k and it will still only have half the ram of an M7 system at $100k I would not expect the m8 to be much more expensive than m7 was at launch.

The a barebones Dual EPYC system comes in around 25k with 512gb + 64 cores and no storage. About 11k for the ram and CPUs respectively iirc. The thing with sparc is it can scale up way larger than most x86 systems. Such as a Max of 4TB ram vs 1 or 2 TB in a single system on x86.

Where Oracle sucks the most is per core licensing... But everybody is moving to that in Enterprise.

[Holograph]

faster or "as fast"?

2x faster = 3x as fast

[torsionbar28]

And coast probably 4 times of an x86

If you want Solaris, you buy a SPARC machine from Oracle. If you want AIX, you buy a POWER from IBM. If you want HP-UX, you buy an Itanium from HP. The chip cost is not relevant at all, and is barely a drop in the bucket compared to the total platform cost and the vendor support contract. These are not tinkertoy peecee's for grandma to check her AOL email.

[cjcox]

Finally! I'm switching all of your-credit-matters-2.us severs to SPARC using our Apache struts software we developed last year. I'll let you know when it's all online.

Free credit information for all!!

[torsionbar28]

Where Oracle sucks the most is per core licensing... But everybody is moving to that in Enterprise.

Eh, no. Oracle does it differently than most others, at least when it comes to virtualization. Have a 64 core server running a single Oracle Database VM with 4 cores? You pay Oracle for 64 cores worth of licensing, even though your Oracle Database is only using 4 cores. It's fantastically stupid. They incentivize you to buy servers with very few cores, even as the industry is moving towards many cores per socket.

[audi.rs4]

Eh, no. Oracle does it differently than most others, at least when it comes to virtualization. Have a 64 core server running a single Oracle Database VM with 4 cores? You pay Oracle for 64 cores worth of licensing, even though your Oracle Database is only using 4 cores. It's fantastically stupid. They incentivize you to buy servers with very few cores, even as the industry is moving towards many cores per socket.

My guess when they made this switch was because they believed they were losing business because at true-up/audit time, the VMs would be cut back to the minimum spec for payment, then increase until the next audit. As I said though, just my guess.