24 September 2017

New Oracle SPARC M8 CPU and T8/M8 Servers

On September 18th 2017 Oracle announced the Next-Generation SPARC Processor and Servers.

The full webcast is available at

SPARC M8 CPU
The SPARC M8 chip has 32-cores running at 5.0 GHz, with 8 threads per core a total of 256 threads per processor. The L1 cache with 32KB is double the size of the previous SPARC M7 chip.
Each of the 32 cores now includes an Oracle Database Number unit to accelerate Oracle Numbers arithmetic performance. SHA-3 was added to the many crypto ciphers supported by the cores.

Performance improvements compared to the SPARC M7
- Single-Thread 1,5x
- CPU Frequency +21%
- Memory Bandwidth +16%
- Memory Access +6%

SPARC Servers with the SPARC M8 CPU
There are 5 Servers using the new SPARC M8 processor: SPARC T8-1, T8-2, T8-4, M8-8 and SuperCluster M8. The Servers require Solaris 11.3 SRU24 or later. Solaris 10 1/13 with latest patches is also supported to run inside Logical Domains.



Oracle Solaris 11.4
The new Solaris 11.4 release is planned for Fall 2018.
Oracle repeated to support Solaris 11 at least to 2034.


SPARC M8 Benchmark Links



Oracle SPARC M8 for SAS - Vertical Scaling for Secure, Rapid, Agile Environments