Yes, I know I am more of a sofware geek, than a hardware geek, but I spent the day listening to all the goodness of the new Sparc M7 chip.. and Wow..
This was announced at OOW '15, and you can find a lot of the information here.
I think what excited me wasn't just the benchmarks that you can find here, ir was the idea of Software-on-Silicon.
That's the big story for software geeks.. The idea of the DAX...
I know DAX sounds like something out of Dr. Seuss.
The DAX (Database Analytics Accelerator) is a special section of the new processor dedicated to In-Memory processes.
If you have read through Maria Colgans blog (which you should) you learn about how In-memory takes advantage of the SIMD instruction set available on the intel Chip.. The SIMD instructions are able to scan multiple rows of data in one CPU cycle. That's part of what makes the In-Memory option process data so fast.
What does this have to do the M7 ? The DAX replaces the SIMD instructions when you are running in-memory queries on the M7. The DAX is specifically built to run this instruction set and the results are then fed to the CPU.
What does this mean for you ? It means that the DAX is able to not only process the data faster than the SIMD processing on Intel, but it also does not use any of the CPU power to execute the In-Memory scanning. You get faster performance, and you use less CPU.
That's the point of the DAX, and the Software-on-Silicon. Faster performance with silicon that is built specially for an oracle workload (In-Memory in this case).
This was announced at OOW '15, and you can find a lot of the information here.
I think what excited me wasn't just the benchmarks that you can find here, ir was the idea of Software-on-Silicon.
That's the big story for software geeks.. The idea of the DAX...
I know DAX sounds like something out of Dr. Seuss.
The DAX (Database Analytics Accelerator) is a special section of the new processor dedicated to In-Memory processes.
If you have read through Maria Colgans blog (which you should) you learn about how In-memory takes advantage of the SIMD instruction set available on the intel Chip.. The SIMD instructions are able to scan multiple rows of data in one CPU cycle. That's part of what makes the In-Memory option process data so fast.
What does this have to do the M7 ? The DAX replaces the SIMD instructions when you are running in-memory queries on the M7. The DAX is specifically built to run this instruction set and the results are then fed to the CPU.
What does this mean for you ? It means that the DAX is able to not only process the data faster than the SIMD processing on Intel, but it also does not use any of the CPU power to execute the In-Memory scanning. You get faster performance, and you use less CPU.
That's the point of the DAX, and the Software-on-Silicon. Faster performance with silicon that is built specially for an oracle workload (In-Memory in this case).