CPU Shack: Oracle SPARC M4 Engineering Samples

CPUShack · Last edited by CPUShack on Thu Dec 24, 2015 12:11 pm; edited 2 times in total

First let's talk about what the M4 is

Oracle uses the same core in multiple chips, in this case its the S3 SPARC core. The S3 core was developed after the S2 (used in the T3) The S2 had very bad single thread performance, so Oracle reworked it entirely.

The SPARC T4 used 8 S3 cores, and has 4M of L3 cache, running at around 3GHz. Its made by TSMC on a 40nm process

The M4 uses the SAME S3 cores, but has only 6 of them, it however increases the L4 cache to 48MB, and adds some coherency hardware to allow 32 socket systems

The 'M' series of processors is the mainframe SPARC, it is designed to be much more fault tolerant, and scalable then its T series brethren. It is meant to fill the slot of where Fujitsu's SPARC64 line went (it should be noted that the Fujitsu SPARC VII+ was also called the M3)

The M4 was canceled (some say rebranded to the M5 but that isn't entirely true)
Why was the M4 canceled? Because by the time they had got it working, the T4 had been shrunk to a TSMC 28nm process, and clock speeds bumped to 3.6GHz, which resulted in the T5, and using these updated S3 cores, Oracle came out with the M5 (which actually also uses a different package from the T4 T5 and M4)

all that out of the way, here is a mess of M4 samples, they have some minor chips, but still in very good shape for what they are.

1x SPARC M4 PG1.0.0 Early No barcode 113x $20
6x SPARC M4 PG1.0.0 about 2 months later production 114x, barcode added $20
4x SPARC M4 PG2.0.0 2012 samples $20
SOLD OUTx PG 2.1.0 marked ENG likely made right before switching to the M5 $25 (post anyways though incase I get more)