By James Niccolai | CIO 
IBM described its Power7+ at Hot Chips, while Oracle gave the first look at its T5
IBM and Oracle have shared more details about the new RISC chips they’re building for server customers, the Power7+ in the case of IBM and the T5 for Oracle. Despite a trend down, the Unix category still generated US$2.3 billion in revenue last quarter, or about one-fifth of the overall server market, according to IDC.
IBM’s new, eight-core Power7+, expected before the end of the year, is being manufactured on a 32-nanometer process, compared with 45 nanometers for the Power7. The more advanced process enables smaller transistors, which means IBM could fit several new features on the chip while keeping it about the same size.
While IBM and Oracle both optimize their chips for their own servers, Oracle is more explicit that it optimizes its processors for its software as well. Oracle says customers will get the best performance if they’re willing to sign a whole system over to Oracle and run its database and applications on Oracle hardware.
Its upcoming T5 processor is a 28-nanometer shrink of the T4 shown at last year’s Hot Chips. When Oracle went from the T3 to the T4, it halved the core count from 16 to eight in order to focus instead on improving each core’s single-thread performance. The T5 will be back to 16 cores, each running at up to 3.6GHz, compared with 3GHz on the T4.
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