SPARC T4

The SPARC T4 is a microprocessor designed by Oracle Corporation. It is a member of the SPARC family of processors and was introduced in 2011. The T4 is notable for its "chip multithreading" (CMT) architecture, which aims to maximize throughput by executing multiple threads concurrently on each core.

Each SPARC T4 processor features eight SPARC S3 cores. Each S3 core is an out-of-order execution core capable of executing up to eight threads simultaneously. This allows the processor to efficiently handle workloads with high levels of parallelism.

Key features of the SPARC T4 include:

• Eight S3 Cores: Providing eight independent processing units.
• Eight Threads per Core: Allowing each core to handle multiple threads concurrently.
• Integrated L2 Cache: A large L2 cache is shared by the cores to reduce memory latency.
• Integrated L3 Cache: Further improving performance by providing another layer of fast memory access.
• Integrated DDR3 Memory Controllers: Allowing direct access to DDR3 memory.
• Hardware Acceleration: Includes cryptographic acceleration and other hardware-based enhancements.
• On-Chip Interconnect: A high-bandwidth interconnect facilitates communication between the cores, caches, and memory controllers.

The SPARC T4 was primarily targeted towards enterprise server workloads, such as database servers and application servers, where high throughput and efficient resource utilization are crucial. It represented an evolution of the SPARC architecture, emphasizing thread-level parallelism as a means of achieving high performance. The SPARC T4 succeeded the SPARC T3 and was followed by later generations of SPARC processors.