Oracle has announced exciting news on SPARC technology. New enhancements for SPARC T8 and M8 servers are now available, including a 2X increase in memory capacity, and a 2.5X increase in network speeds.

Oracle SPARC T8 and M8 servers, based on the SPARC M8 processor, already have a performance advantage for enterprise workloads. For instance, the SPARC M8 processor has shown 40% better performance per core for Java operations, compared to commodity solutions. However, many of our customers have applications that can be accelerated by utilizing increasing amounts of memory. In order to address those needs, we are announcing the availability of 128 GB DIMMs for SPARC T8-4, T8-2 and T8-1 servers, which allows configuration of up to 2 TB per processor, or 64 GB per core, a 2X increase compared to the capacity available with the current 64 GB DIMMs. Availability of the new 128 GB DIMMs is also planned for the SPARC M8-8 servers in the future.

Another enhancement announced is support for 100 Gigabit Ethernet networks. The Oracle Dual Port 100 Gb Ethernet Adapter is now supported into SPARC T8-4, T8-2, T8-1 and M8-8 servers. This is the same adapter integrated into Oracle engineered systems such as Exadata Database Machine X9M, Oracle Private Cloud Appliance X8-2, and Oracle ZFS Storage Appliance ZS9-2. This is an improvement of 2.5X over a single connection compared with the current 40 Gb Ethernet adapter offered, and allows SPARC systems to be readily connected to the latest, fastest Gigabit Ethernet networks.

All these advancements come in addition to the unique features that Oracle SPARC servers offer, such as no-overhead encryption, protection to application data in memory, and hardware acceleration of data analytics. More details can be found in this article and this update. Key features for SPARC systems are also delivered through Oracle Solaris OS technology, like enterprise-class security, easy-to-use observability, and comprehensive compliance reporting. Check out how Oracle continues to deliver innovation in Oracle Solaris 11.4 here.

The Oracle Systems Engineering Forum 2021 – Oracle Servers was held December 2021 across several regions and timezones. Oracle’s engineering team discussed these latest news, presented demos, and answered questions. Details and an event recording are available here.

For more information, please check out these additional resources:

Performance notes

Performance information for Oracle’s SPARC systems is available at http://blogs.oracle.com/bestperf

SPEC and the benchmark name SPECjbb are registered trademarks of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC). Results from http://www.spec.org as of 12/08/2021. SPARC T8-1 153,532 SPECjbb2015-MultiJVM max-jOPS, 89,980 SPECjbb2015-MultiJVM critical-jOPS; HP ProLiant DL380 Gen10 173,773 SPECjbb2015-MultiJVM max-jOPS, 40,225 SPECjbb2015-MultiJVM critical-jOPS; HP ProLiant DL325 Gen10 Plus 210,387 SPECjbb2015-MultiJVM max-jOPS, 71,928 SPECjbb2015-MultiJVM critical-jOPS.

SPEC and the benchmark name SPECjEnterprise are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. Results from www.spec.org as of 9/28/2017. SPARC T8-1, 34,259.69 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS (unsecure); SPARC T8-1, 32,622.97 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS (secure); SPARC S7-2, 14,400.78 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS (unsecure); SPARC S7-2, 14,121.47 SPECjEnterprise2010 EjOPS (secure).