Oracle and Fujitsu are set to disclose details about their next-generation SPARC microprocessors designed for mission-critical servers at Hot Chips conference late next month. Both chips will have sixteen cores and will be available in the coming month.

At the Hot Chips conference, Fujitsu will describe its SPARC64 X: the company's new generation sixteen core processor for the next generation UNIX servers. It is interesting to note that Fujitsu will not describe its SPARC64 IXfx sixteen-core microprocessor for supercomputers that it has been developing together with LSI Corp., but plans to release details about SPARC64 X, which is presumably more advanced.

As expected, Oracle plans to reveal details about its first chip produced using 28nm fabrication process at TSMC, the  sixteen core SPARC T5 CMT processor with "glueless 1-hop scaling to 8-sockets". Earlier Oracle Oracle clearly stated that it will integrate proprietary special-purpose hardware accelerators into its chips - starting from T5 - to speed up its own software. For example, Oracle plans to add memory versioning, in memory columnar database acceleration, hardware decompression and other software-specific accelerators into its silicon.

Oracle earlier planned to release its SPARC T5 multi-core microprocessor for multi-socket servers by the end of this year and currently it manages to stick to the plan as the chip was taped out late last year and the company has been testing it for some time now.

Both sixteen-core SPARC chips from Fujitsu and Oracle will compete against IBM Power 7+ and Intel Itanium "Poulson" microprocessors in proprietary mission-critical and supercomputing systems.

Tags: Fujitsu, Oracle, LSI, Sparc, 40nm, TSMC, Sun Microsystems, 28nm, SPARC T5