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.