SPARC-T3 Servers Announced!

Last week while at Oracle OpenWorld, the SPARC-T3 servers were announced! These are the third generation of CMT servers to be released. Three rack mount servers and a blade module were announced. These are all based on what was going to be called the UltraSPARC-T3 processor, but what is now called the SPARC T3 processor. The SPARC T3 processor has the following specifications:

• 16 Cores x 8 Threads = 128 Threads Running at 1.65Ghz!
• 2 x Execution Units per Core with 4 x Threads Each!
• 1 x Floating Unit and 1 x Crypto Unit per Core!
• 6MB of Shared L2 Cache
• 2 x DDR3 Memory Controllers
• 6 x Coherency Links for Glue-Less SMP upto 4 Sockets!
• 2 x 10GbE NIU Controllers
• 2 x PCI-E 2.0 Controllers -> 8GB/s Bi-Directional I/O Each!
  

Each server bares this as the model name with a single number following it representing the number of sockets. Here are the high-level specifications of the SPARC T3 servers:


One of the big changes with this generation is the removal of the 1 rack unit servers as they were being outsold by the 2 rack unit and above servers. This makes sense as most clients want the extra PCI-E slots and internal storage capacity. The T3-1B is meant for the Sun Fire 6000 Blade chassis and follows the standard form factor there. The T3-1 server re-uses the chassis for the T5240 servers. The T3-2 and T3-4 servers re-use the chassis from the Sun Fire X-series x64 servers. The most impressive change is the T3-4 server which uses the PCI-E PEM modules which enable hot-swapping of the PCI-E cards. The T3-4 server provides 16 PCI-E PEM slots to work with, which is more I/O slots than the x4800 server the chassis is based on! These servers are definitely designed to help customers take advantage of virtualization and consolidation with Solaris Containers and Oracle VM Server for SPARC (LDoms)!

While walking around at Oracle OpenWorld, I had a chance to take pictures of these new servers:







Some of the interesting features of the SPARC T3 servers that most people at the conference probably missed are:

• Integrated Graphics Console (15-pin VGA)
• RFID Tags on Face Plate
• Enhanced Power Management (Even at the CPU and Memory Level)
• More Hot-Swappable Components!

Already Oracle has released benchmarks using its middle-ware and database products to compare the SPARC T3 servers against Intel Nehalems and IBM POWER7 servers! This is really exciting as for the first time there are some real world benchmarks out at the server announcement release. This will go a long way to showing that SPARC can still pack a punch and compete even against IBM POWER7 servers!

In the next post, I'll talk about Oracle VM Server for SPARC 2.0!