Friday, March 29, 2013

Hot Chips 24: SPARC T5 Overview


[SPARC T5 Processor, courtesy Oracle 2013-03-26 Announcement]
Abstract:
Every year, the best of engineering talent comes together in academia for Hot Chips conference, to present the best system designs. During Hot Chips 24, Session 9 - the SPARC T5 was presented by Sebastian Turullols and Ram Sivaramakrishnan from Oracle on Wednesday, August 29, 2012. This processor was released 6 months later, by Oracle with their T5 systems on Tuesday March 26, 2013.

Video Presentation:
The video presentation of Session 9 was conducted by Fujitsu, Oracle, and IBM. The middle portion of the presentation, starting at 30 minutes, includes the Oracle presenters.


Slide Presentation:

The following screen shots were taken of the presentation. The full presentation is available here.




[4x memory controllers are capable of a peak of 128 GigaBytes per Second]











[Acceleration of Contended Locks; linked list of address requests; all requests satisfied atomically]

[Directory based level 3 indices, tracked up to 8 sockets on an on-chip SRAM]

[7 links with 14 lanes per link between sockets]


[C2C is a sharing cache]


[28 GigaBytes bandwidth between nodes; allows for aggregation of throughput via intermediate node]




[OLTP workload is extremely shared, makes workloads very difficult to scale]

[Elastic Mode includes all of the power saving features automatically]


[Solaris makes frequency request from hypervisor; cores reduced or cycle skipping used]



[Frequency and Voltage pushes performance maximum possible by the system]








Question-Answer Session: The following information was provided during the Question-Answer session, from the audience.
  • Voltage required for 3.6GHz varies from part to part. 0.95-1v is needed.
  • There is one voltage supply for all cores; one common PLL for the entire chip. Cycle skipping is used to vary cycle rate.
  • Low latency clustering port leverages "Allocated DMA Feature"
  • T5 no longer has an integrated 10 Gigabie Ethernet Controller.

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