Oracle Newsletter

Transcending Technology | Building Ecosystems
Oracle announced the SPARC M7 processor in October 2015. This
revolutionary new processor features Oracle’s Software in Silicon
technology with unique capabilities for information security and
database & Java acceleration. The performance of data analytic queries
has been increased dramatically by means of Data Analytics
Accelerator engines (DAX). The DAX offloads query processing and
performs real-time data compression in memory. This inline
decompression feature now allows storage of up to twice as much data
in the same memory footprint and all of this without any performance
penalty.
The OASC performed some internal tests on the SPARC S7 processor
chip that uses the same core technology as the M7. Comparative
tests were run on a SPARC Minicluster S7-2 system and the latest
x86 system using Intel E5-2600 v4 processor technology.
The Oracle sample schema for Database 12c was used to create
two identical tables, each with 88 million rows of sales data on
both the SPARC system and the x86 system. The same number of
resources was assigned to both systems. One of the tables was
configured to run in-memory. The same complex SQL query was
run on both tables and the execution times were recorded. The
results were very impressive. The in-memory query ran between
3-4 times faster on the x86 system. On the SPARC system, using
the new DAX feature, the query ran 35-40 times faster, proving
the fact that DAX really works!
Oracle has just released the SPARC M8 processor which now
contains Software in Silicon version 2.0 and promises to
provide even better performance for analytics workloads.