Monthly Archives: June 2023

Oracle switches to AMD for full Exadata X10M lineup, what else is new?

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Chipset switch to AMD

So back in September 2022, I noticed the Oracle Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M switched to AMD, where as the Exadata X9M On-premises and Exdata X9M Cloud @ Customer remained on Intel. More details in my blog post here.

It come as no surprise the whole lineup has now switched to AMD! Why? Well putting it simply AMD has beaten Intel on the number of cores for sometime now and with the scalability of Exadata it make senses to have the upper limit cores that AMD offers. Oracle is now using the AMD EPYC 9J14 processors.

Where has the Persistent Memory gone?

Since Exadata X8M, Intel Optane Persistent Memory has existed in the storage cells, bringing an additional layer to the multi-tiered storage architecture. Persistent Memory has the benefit of being order of magnitude faster then Flash but at the fraction of the cost of DDR memory resulting in the Exadata Persistent Memory Data Accelerator.

Simply put, you can’t have AMD chipset with Intel Optane Persistent Memory, so Oracle had to come up with a new solution which they glossed over in the announcement. Which they replaced the Persistent Memory with DDR5 memory and address the memory from the compute nodes using the new feature called Exadata RDMA Memory (XRMEM). This extends the existing Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), to create a new shared read accelerator. Interesting Oracle compromised on the writes accelerator that Persistent Memory gave but they would have done the analysis and probably Persistent Memory was largely fronting reads and the penalty to flush to Flash instead of Persistent Memory probably wasn’t that significant. There is now 1.5TB DDR5 DRAM in storage cell compared to 256GB in X9M with 1.5TB Persistent Memory.

What else is new?

The other highlights are:

  • Increased memory configuration of 512GB, 1.5TB, 2.25TB and 3TB DDR5 DRAM in the compute nodes
  • PCIe 4 replaced with PCIe 5, to give 2x 100Gb/sec active-active RoCE network for impressive total throughput of 200Gb/sec
  • Extreme Flash storage server now has the introduction of “capacity optimised” flash drive combined with “performance optimised” flash cards to give impressive increase of 2.4x over X9M
  • 22TB disks instead of 18TB on X9M, giving 22% increase storage

Those that know me, will know I have been predicting:

  • Full switch to AMD chipset for whole Exadata lineup
  • Some sort of replacement for Persistent Memory
  • 22TB hard disk drives

I’m glad to say I was right on all accounts 🙂

For more Info

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Thanks

Zed DBA (Zahid Anwar)