Processor Whispers: About clouds, clients and clinches

by Andreas Stiller

Everyone is in a clinch these days, HP is up against HP, HP is up against Oracle, and Apple is up against the rest of the world. Oracle is getting especially feisty – with revelations and with new hardware and software.

On the eternal topic of RISC vs CISC, according to RISC guru David Patterson at Intel's Developer Forum, the world of today is divided into clouds and clients. The professor of computer science at Berkeley University says that the clouds are clearly dominated by CISC proponent Intel, whose x86 processors basically use RISC-like technology, too, internally. However, the overwhelming majority of clients, and the attention has meanwhile been shifting towards them, depend on classic RISC, especially the ARM architecture developed by Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber in the 80s. The former sell maybe 350 million processors a year while the latter, with all the gadgets, smartphones and tablets, sell 6 billion. So who has won?

Mobile Clouds

Years ago, the RISC company Sun, once leader of the server market, travelled from tradeshow to tradeshow with powerful truck tractors and large containers that housed a mobile computing centre, first christened Project Blackbox and later Modular Datacenter. Sun managed to win over numerous clients in science, oil industry, telecommunication and so on – now, three years later, Hewlett-Packard claims to have obtained "one of the first confirmed commercial HPC container contracts".

Well, okay, HP secured a very big client for its containers: Airbus. And the company even ordered two of those containers, which are called Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD), one for Toulouse and one for Hamburg. Together, the two units, equipped with 2016 ProLiant BL280 G6 servers with two Intel six-core Xeons X5675 each, managed 244 teraflops in the Linpack benchmark in a test run some months ago, placing 29th on the Top500 list of supercomputers.

So this news is not exactly "new". Perhaps, HP wants to distract from the turbulence caused by the sudden change in leadership with such announcements. Some of the "regicides", the ones who had hoped ex-eBay boss Meg Whitman would revoke some of the strategic decisions made by the former HP CEO Léo Apotheker, are probably disappointed right now. Shortly after her appointment, she made it known that she is still considering spinning off the PC branch or selling it, and also intends to stick to the planned acquisition of the software company Autonomy.

In the same context, the atmosphere with Oracle is virtually poisoned. And there's also tension because of other issues, like the ongoing legal dispute about Oracle's software ceasing to support the Itanium. Recently, Oracle boss Ellison claimed that Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch and his investment banker had visited Oracle President Mark Hurd – another discarded HP CEO – in California to offer the company for sale at, according to Oracle, too high a price. Lynch strongly denies this; at first he couldn't remember any visit to Oracle, then he could, but he had only discussed database technology. To jog his memory, Oracle, in an unusual undertaking, has now made the then-presented slides available online, at www.oracle.com/pleasebuyautonomy. They are about markets, shares and finances – there is nothing to be found in them about database technologies ...

"SPARC's out of gas", says IBM. But IBM's Power graph doesn't look great either. But Oracle is also striking back on other fronts. At the end of September, Oracle's technology conference OpenWorld was held, where lots of new hardware and software products were released. Recently, IBM's senior vice president Steve Mills said, "SPARC's out of gas", which is understandable in the light of the IDC market numbers. Not quite, says Larry Ellison. Now, Oracle presents the Supercluster with UltraSPARC T4, and the successor T5 will have twice the performance next year.

As for the T4, Oracle points out the five times higher single-thread performance in comparison to its predecessor which had twice as many cores. Besides, it can also shine in some standard benchmarks from the, arguably more important for web and databases, world of multi-threading and show its competitors from IBM and HP their limits with its powerful SPARC processors.

Oracle's Supercluster T4 aims to make SPARC more interesting for clouds again. For instance, in SPECjEnterprise2010, the IBM Power 780 is easily beaten by 40,000 to 16,600 EjOPS with, on one side, 16 T4 at 3 GHz, and on the other side 8 Power 7 at 3.86 Ghz. Also in the TPC-H transaction benchmark with 1 TB database size, HP's Integrity Superdome with Tukwila-Itanium and IBM Power 780 are clearly outclassed by the Supercluster T4 – even more so when weighing performance and price. On Sun's web site it says $3.72 per QphH, at TPC's site it is $4.60, in comparison to $6.85 at IBM and $12.15 at HP. In the end, however, none of these large RISC/EPIC machines dominates this benchmark. It's the fast Xeon clusters from Dell, which already offer more than twice the TPC-H performance with a four-socket system with Xeon E7-8837, that take first place, at only $0.88 per QphH.

But, within the scope of the Exalogical Elastic Cloud, Sun/Oracle will offer new Xeon systems, too. They are part of a complete package of hardware and software optimised for cloud deployment. According to Oracle, in comparison with an unspecified "comparison system", they perform 1.4 times better with web, 3.6 times better with databases, and even 9 times better with SOA.

Naturally, "friendships" like the ones between HP, IBM and Oracle can also be found in the client camp, in particular between Apple and Samsung. And now Apple has gained a new "friend", VIA Technologies or, more precisely, its processor spin-off Centaur. The chief centaur, Glenn Henry, holds numerous patents on processor technology and, according to the complaint the company filed with the District Court of Delaware and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Apple's A4 processor infringes on at least three of these patents.

(djwm)