
"Oracle has pulled the rug out from under Intel's Itanium processor by yanking support of its database, middleware, and application software on future Poulson and Kittson Itaniums. It looks as though Larry Ellison wants to take on IBM in microprocessors for data center systems,
man to man, head to head. 'I remember when we first bought Sun, a lot of people said we were going to get out of the hardware business," Oracle's co-founder and CEO said opening up his keynote at the OpenWorld customer and partner and conference on Sunday night, when he also announced the new Exalytics in-memory BI appliance. 'I guess we didn't get that memo,' Ellison quipped, pointing out that Apple is doing a 'pretty good job' designing its own hardware and software and making it work well with its own services. And that Oracle is not only committed to making its server, storage, and networking business work, but having taken Sun's hardware as a means of getting its hands on Solaris and Java, Oracle is actually enthusiastic about creating its own stack."
Member since:
2008-08-27
If I remember correctly, the Power processors are designed to compute everything simultaneously on two different processors then compares the results. The idea is to rule out hardware flaws, but it also cuts the core count in half.
It might be possible to arrange that with a POWER7, but I don't think it's common - it sounds more like something you'd find in the zSeries.
The zSeries uses what they call the z/Architecture - the operating systems see a very CISC set of available instructions that's backward compatible to sometime around the invention of the wheel, though with extensions for modern things like 64-bit operation. This is (I believe) implemented on some unholy combination of firmware and a POWER-based, but very customized, CPU.