T4: A highly-threaded server-on-a-chip with native support for heterogeneous computing

Wednesday Feb. 8, 2012
CIC 4th floor Panther Hollow
4:00 pm

Jared Smolens (Oracle)

Abstract

This talk describes the microarchitecture of Oracle's newest processor, the UltraSPARC T4. T4 contains eight out-of-order processing cores that each dynamically support up to 8 threads to provide balanced single- and multi-threaded performance. T4 includes a shared 4 MB L3 cache, two on-chip memory controllers supporting buffered DDR3 memory, two 10 Gb Ethernet controllers, and two x8 PCI-Express 2.0 channels. The new SPARC processor cores incorporate dynamic resource allocation and thread-hog mitigation techniques across threads to maximize core throughput under homogenous and heterogeneous workloads.

Bio

Jared Smolens is a Principle Engineer at Oracle in Santa Clara, CA where he leads performance and power modeling of a future UltraSPARC processor core. He started modeling of T4 at Sun Microsystems and followed the design through pre-silicon performance verification and post-silicon performance tuning. He received his Ph.D. degree from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and has authored several papers on soft error detection.


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