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chuckula
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Panicked Response to AMD Epyc... from Oracle

Mon Sep 18, 2017 12:47 pm

So clearly AMD has terrified the living daylights out of Oracle.
Behold the Launch of the Sparc M8.

32 Coarz.
Five Gigahurtz.
100% Panic over Epyc (or maybe not).

As for pricing, well... they have an 800 number for you to call to ask for a quote. If you dare.
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UberGerbil
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Re: Panicked Response to AMD Epyc... from Oracle

Mon Sep 18, 2017 1:07 pm

In other news --- Sparc is still a thing, apparently. At least for now.

Larry Ellison always wanted to out-Microsoft Microsoft, and he seems to have succeeded in one metric: Oracle is even worse than Redmond at acquiring companies and then pissing them into nothingness.
 
Waco
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Re: Panicked Response to AMD Epyc... from Oracle

Mon Sep 18, 2017 1:10 pm

They've been getting ready to launch the M8 for quite a while now. It's not a response to Epyc, it's more of a bid to keep their server/database division afloat.
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Vhalidictes
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Re: Panicked Response to AMD Epyc... from Oracle

Mon Sep 18, 2017 1:10 pm

That's interesting, Chuckula. I thought that Sparc was a dead platform. It's somewhat surprising to see Oracle is still funding it.
 
mattshwink
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Re: Panicked Response to AMD Epyc... from Oracle

Mon Sep 18, 2017 1:16 pm

Vhalidictes wrote:
That's interesting, Chuckula. I thought that Sparc was a dead platform. It's somewhat surprising to see Oracle is still funding it.


We still run it, bought a T5-8 a few years ago. Still rocking a M8000 and a M5000's as well. It's a funny joke I love to play on all the cloud providers that want us to move to them. I have to ask - do you run SPARC? - to which the answer is always a confused no. At which point I tell them it's no point pitching to us.
 
Ummagumma
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Re: Panicked Response to AMD Epyc... from Oracle

Mon Sep 18, 2017 1:18 pm

I thought that Sparc was a dead platform. It's somewhat surprising to see Oracle is still funding it.


Oracle still has it's anxious supplicants. So occasionally Oracle must "throw them a bone" to keep them happy. :lol:
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AMDisDEC
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Re: Panicked Response to AMD Epyc... from Oracle

Mon Sep 18, 2017 1:57 pm

It's not in response to Intel or AMD but to keep their Solaris customers happy as well as to improve platform performance. It seems like yesterday when Sun had the only 16 thread CPU in town.
The great thing about SPARC and Solaris is there aren't many hackers focusing on the platform and it is an ultra stable platform as well.

Rather than AMD, Oracle is more in the total system platform business against other systems solution vendors like IBM.
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DragonDaddyBear
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Re: Panicked Response to AMD Epyc... from Oracle

Mon Sep 18, 2017 2:08 pm

256 threads O_O
 
just brew it!
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Re: Panicked Response to AMD Epyc... from Oracle

Mon Sep 18, 2017 2:41 pm

Waco wrote:
They've been getting ready to launch the M8 for quite a while now. It's not a response to Epyc, it's more of a bid to keep their server/database division afloat.

Yup. You don't design and release a new processor architecture in a few months. They've been working on this for years.
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Waco
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Re: Panicked Response to AMD Epyc... from Oracle

Mon Sep 18, 2017 2:44 pm

just brew it! wrote:
Waco wrote:
They've been getting ready to launch the M8 for quite a while now. It's not a response to Epyc, it's more of a bid to keep their server/database division afloat.

Yup. You don't design and release a new processor architecture in a few months. They've been working on this for years.

I think the first notes I saw about it were from nearly 5 years ago.
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chuckula
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Re: Panicked Response to AMD Epyc... from Oracle

Mon Sep 18, 2017 2:44 pm

just brew it! wrote:
Waco wrote:
They've been getting ready to launch the M8 for quite a while now. It's not a response to Epyc, it's more of a bid to keep their server/database division afloat.

Yup. You don't design and release a new processor architecture in a few months. They've been working on this for years.


Yeah.. I kinda knew that, but what fun is it when we just say that Oracle released the long-expected M8 SPARC chip?

Right now the bigger uncertainty is if there is ever going to be an M9 considering Oracle's recent layoff frenzy.
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TwistedKestrel
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Re: Panicked Response to AMD Epyc... from Oracle

Mon Sep 18, 2017 2:50 pm

DragonDaddyBear wrote:
256 threads O_O

I clearly don't know anything about SPARC, are they really thread limited? And if so, WHY
 
chuckula
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Re: Panicked Response to AMD Epyc... from Oracle

Mon Sep 18, 2017 3:00 pm

TwistedKestrel wrote:
DragonDaddyBear wrote:
256 threads O_O

I clearly don't know anything about SPARC, are they really thread limited? And if so, WHY


The workloads that these chips typically perform (hint: It rhymes with "massively expensive Oracle Databases and maybe J2EE stuff too") tend to respond well to adding additional threads on each core.
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TwistedKestrel
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Re: Panicked Response to AMD Epyc... from Oracle

Mon Sep 18, 2017 3:07 pm

Oh wait, so that's like 256 thread SMT, and not a 256 thread limit?
 
chuckula
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Re: Panicked Response to AMD Epyc... from Oracle

Mon Sep 18, 2017 3:08 pm

TwistedKestrel wrote:
Oh wait, so that's like 256 thread SMT, and not a 256 thread limit?


Each chip provides up to 256 threads simply because it has 32 cores and up to 8 threads per core so 32 * 8 = 256. That's all. If you want to really spend money you can buy a multi-socket system that hosts multiple chips too.
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the
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Re: Panicked Response to AMD Epyc... from Oracle

Mon Sep 18, 2017 3:46 pm

TwistedKestrel wrote:
Oh wait, so that's like 256 thread SMT, and not a 256 thread limit?


Nope, Oracle has previously shipped systems with 4096 concurrent threads running. I know that when they reached that figure, they increase the number of concurrent threads to 65,536. That sounds like a lot but they have fabric that could scale to 96 sockets, so conceptually they are a third of the way there to that figure.

The real craziness is that there maybe systems in a few years that go beyond 65,536 concurrent threads which would dictate another change to a kernel's scheduler.
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Ummagumma
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Re: Panicked Response to AMD Epyc... from Oracle

Mon Sep 18, 2017 5:39 pm

chuckula wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
Waco wrote:
They've been getting ready to launch the M8 for quite a while now. It's not a response to Epyc, it's more of a bid to keep their server/database division afloat.

Yup. You don't design and release a new processor architecture in a few months. They've been working on this for years.


Yeah.. I kinda knew that, but what fun is it when we just say that Oracle released the long-expected M8 SPARC chip?

Right now the bigger uncertainty is if there is ever going to be an M9 considering Oracle's recent layoff frenzy.


Sounds like the twisted logic used by the editors of Slashdot to "craft" their headlines..... :lol:
Did you expect to read anything useful here?

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