New Delhi, Dec 29: Oracle’s state-of-the-art SPARC M7 microprocessor, the world’s first silicon-based memory intrusion detection and a high-speed encryption chip, offers data security and memory protection without performance degradation and is cost-effective, a top executive of Oracle India has said. With the new microprocessor that has taken data security to an entirely new level, the global software and cloud major Oracle is three to five years ahead of its competitors and have received a good response from the Indian companies, he added.
“Traditiolly, whenever we provide security, it results in a performance degradation and cost increase. We have architectured this microprocessor in a way in which the application integrity checks are happening at a crypto-level,” Amit Malhotra, head (systems LoB), India systems at Oracle, told IANS in an interview.
Oracle introduced 32-core, 256-thread SPARC M7 at the “OpenWorld 2015” conference in San Francisco in October this year. “The security is always on with the first-ever hardware-based memory intrusion detection. It detects cyber threats real-time and shut and elimite bugs,” Oracle’s executive chairman and chief technology officer Larry Ellison announced during the launch.
“This processor has 32 cores while everybody else in the market is offering only 16 or less cores. Each core has eight threads, so you are getting 256 threads with M7. Most of the applications are written in JAVA and each JAVA application uses one thread at a time, so because of the high-core density, you get better performance,” Malhotra explained.
Other microprocessors try to optimise performance by reducing security features but with the high number of threads in M7, the workload on the main cores is not affected by the security aspect and the performance degradation does not happen.
“With SPARC M7, the performance is of the roof with its ‘always on security’ and the price is almost 1.8x lower than our previous inventions,” he noted.
Apart from the “always on” security and no performance degradation, this microprocessor also helps in memory protection.
For any application to write in the processor, some memory is needed in the system. When malicious software comes in, it sits on the top of the application and through this application, it accesses the memory infecting the whole database. (ians)