Given Intel Corp.’s near-complete dominance of the server processor market, it’s tempting to dismiss alternatives like the SPARC series from Oracle Corp. as hopeless underdogs. But while they may have fit that description until recently, Wikibon co-founder David Floyer says the situation is starting to change thanks to the convergence of two major trends in the semiconductor world.

The first is the increasing difficulty and cost of following Moore’s law, the famous prediction that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit will double every two years. Floyer noted in a report last week that the phenomenon has led the clock speed of commodity chips like those Intel sells to become capped at 4GHz, with the only major exception being IBM Corp.’s mainframe processors. The issue is compounded by the other big factor working in favor of Oracle: A rule called Amdahl’s law that pertains to the optimal number of cores needed for a parallel application.

Floyer says that this number ranges between 16 and 32 for the majority of processor-intensive enterprise applications. According to his calculations, any additional cores that may be included on a chip are rendered ineffective by the disproportionate amount of overhead required to take advantage of them. That means Intel’s historically hardware-centric approach to improving the speed of its processors will become increasingly difficult to maintain moving  forward. As a result, the company must turn its attention to improving the efficiency of the software running on top, an area where Oracle boasts a significant head start.

As Floyer detailed in another report published late last month, the SPARC series is specifically optimized to run the company’s flagship relational database. The newest iteration of the series, the M7, divides the space on its integrated circuit between regular cores and custom accelerators that can perform certain database operations incomparably faster than their general-purpose counterparts. Floyer says that the technology enables users to execute some SQL queries up to ten times faster than Intel silicon allows.

And the M7 is able to similarly speed up data encryption, another processor-intensive task that often slows down database deployments. According to Floyer, the chip is capable of reducing the performance loss to less than five percent while also improving security thanks to a feature called Silicon Secured Memory. When enabled, the mechanism attaches a few extra bits to every piece of data in an environment that serve as a sort of password. Attempts to access the information are automatically blocked in the event of the mismatch, while the offending application is terminated in conjunction. 

Floyer advises organizations to take a close look at Oracle systems that incorporate the M7, especially if they already using the company’s database. He expects that the development roadmap of the SPARC series will become more and more entwined with that of the software it’s used to support as the vendor looks to press its advantage against Intel.

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