Analysis Oracle insists it really is going to sell computers powered by Sparc M7 processors – the same chips it started talking about in 2014.
On Monday, Big Red breathlessly unveiled hardware powered by the beefy microprocessor, and on Tuesday, its supremo Larry Ellison lauded the 64-bit CPU's security defenses.
One of these defenses certainly caught our eye: the ability to tag regions of memory so software hijacked by hackers cannot read or write data it isn't supposed to. This should, we're told, render vulnerabilities such as Heartbleed useless to attackers – more on that in a moment.
Where we've come from
Rewind to September last year, and you may recall Ellison bragging about what he said was "the most important thing we've done in silicon, maybe ever." Back then we knew that 32-core M7 packages would be destined for machines juggling thousands of threads with terabytes of RAM. Big heavy boxes with big heavy price tags.
Then in August this year, Oracle's engineers revealed Sonoma: a system-on-chip that uses the M7 blueprints with InfiniBand interfaces and directly accessed RAM bolted on.
Sonoma was billed as a high-density "low-cost Sparc processor for enterprise workloads," ideal for Oracle to build clouds with – an effort which now appears to be taking shape.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/28/oracle_sparc_m7/
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