SPARC T5 Deep Dive

[SPARC T5 Microdie, courtesy Oracle Corporation]

Abstract:
The SPARC platform has existed for over 25 years, with continued binary compatibility. The latest of these processors, the SPARC T5, is about to be released. Oracle published a short written interview with the Rick Hetherington, who is leading the charge on newer SPARC processors.

SPARC T5 Deep Dive:
Oracle regularly publishes short question-answer articles, called Deep Dives, regarding new platforms during the release phase. This latest SPARC T5 release is no different. An overview and questions are listed below. This is the article, for the answer to the questions.

Rick Hetherington, Oracle’s vice president of hardware development, manages a team of architects and performance analysts who design Oracle’s M- and T-series processors. In this interview, Hetherington describes the technical details of the new SPARC T5 processor and expands on the process that is used to design these innovative chips.

Q: What were the design objectives of the SPARC T5 processor?
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Q: So what’s new in the SPARC T5?
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Q: This is mainly a performance increase story then?
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Q: Does the SPARC T5 also support both single-threaded and multi-threaded applications?
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Q: Was there anything in the design process that surprised you, or did things go the way you expected?
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Q: And how do you know which workloads you want to model on?
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Q: What do you mean when you say trace?
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Q: What do you consider innovative in the SPARC T5?
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Q: What kinds of applications will benefit the most from the SPARC T5?
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Q: What about the security features in the T5?
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Q: I’d like to know if there was any kind of optimization with Solaris 11.
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Q: And the Solaris binary compatibility still applies?
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Q. What's the most important thing you want customers to know about the SPARC T5 processor?

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Conclusions:
The SPARC platform continues to seesignificant archtiectural improvements - the T5 is no exception, with combined higher clock speed and double the processing cores. This is tremendously good news to the telecommunications industry, which has been waiting for an upgraded Open Systems platform.