Oracle’s new processor putting software in silicon

One of the more intriguing announcements at OpenWorld was Oracle's Sparc M7 processor, a chip with software integrated at processor level.

The chip – the sixth Oracle has released since its acquisition of Sun, which brought that capability – would be amongst the first of a new generation of silicon that moves some central calculating activity out of software applications down to chip level, where it can be executed at greater speed and with greater security (a feature which Oracle terms ADI – Application Data Integrity).

"We've actually put database accelerator engines into our processors. We can speed up memory access and can spin out results at the speed of memory," Oracle chief technology officer and chairman Larry Ellison noted in his opening keynote.

“This is literally putting some of our database software directly into silicon. We’re actually pioneering here, doing full silicon processing.”

John Fowler, Oracle's executive vice-president of systems, and a former Sun executive, said that "software in silicon" also increases security and would block an exploit like the recent Heartbleed virus because read and write memory at M7 chip level can only be allocated using a key controlled by an administrator.

Some database query operations also take place on silicon with results placed directly into the processor’s cache rather than to system memory. The processor also compresses data queries in real time, and thus can run 10 times as many queries, said Fowler.

The 20 nanometer processor has 32 cores and “20 billion transistors on that little silicon square. So it is magic, actually,” said Fowler during a press briefing after his keynote last week.

Chip development was a focus immediately after the Sun acquisition, Fowler told The Irish Times.

“Frankly, Sun had disinvested and fell behind, which was catastrophic for that area of development.

“[Oracle] thought we would go see if we could innovate in that space, because if you could do something at the [processor] level, you could innovate throughout the system.”

The M7 is due to ship in the first half of 2015 as a standard feature of Oracle hardware, but beta access in the cloud is available immediately for developers who want to work with the chip.