At this year’s OpenWorld in San Francisco, Oracle unveiled the new M7 chip and the associated server systems M7, T7 and SuperCluster M7 Engineered System. Alongside the high processing power, stemming from the 4.1 GHz clock speed, 32 cores and 256 threads, it is primarily the novel design approach ‘Software in Silicon’ that has attracted interest with its ability to integrate software functions directly into the processor.
Firstly, Software in Silicon incorporates the ‘SQL in Silicone’ feature, which shifts the specific data search capabilities of a database query to the hardware, thereby increasing the speed tenfold. In addition, ‘Security in Silicon’ with the extension ‘Silicon Secured Memory’ makes it possible to control data access in real time and thus protect against attackers. The Silicon Secured Memory Protection is used by Oracle’s 12c database as standard. A second extension offers hardware-assisted encryption through the SPARC CPUs. (Source: Oracle/rf)