(upbeat jingle) >> The history of Exadata in the platform is really unique. And from my vantage point, it started earlier this century as a skunkworks inside of Oracle called Project Sage back when grid computing was the next big thing. Oracle saw that betting on standard hardware would put it on an industry curve that would rapidly evolve. Last April, for example, Oracle announced the availability of Exadata X9M in OCI, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. One thing that hasn't been as well publicized is that Exadata on OCI is using AMD's EPYC processors in the database service. EPYC is not Eastern Pacific Yacht Club for all you sailing buffs, rather it stands for Extreme Performance Yield Computing, the enterprise grade version of AMD's Zen architecture which has been a linchpin of AMD's success in terms of penetrating enterprise markets. And to focus on the innovations that AMD and Oracle are bringing to market, we have with us today, Juan Loaiza, who's executive vice president of mission critical technologies at Oracle, and Mark Papermaster, who's the CTO and EVP of technology and engineering at AMD. Juan, welcome back to the show. Mark, great to have you on The Cube in your first appearance, thanks for coming on. Juan, let's start with you. You've been on The Cube a number of times, as I said, and you've talked about how Exadata is a top platform for Oracle database. We've covered that extensively. What's different and unique from your point of view about Exadata Cloud Infrastructure X9M on OCI? >> So as you know, Exadata, it's designed top down to be the best possible platform for database. It has a lot of unique capabilities, like we make extensive use of RDMA, smart storage. We take advantage of everything we can in the leading hardware platforms. X9M is our next generation platform and it does exactly that. We're always wanting to be, to get all the best that we can from the available hardware that our partners like AMD produce. And so that's what X9M in it is, it's faster, more capacity, lower latency, more iOS, pushing the limits of the hardware technology. So we don't want to be the limit, the software database software should not be the limit, it should be the actual physical limits of the hardware. That that's what X9M's all about. >> Why, Juan, AMD chips in X9M? >> We're introducing AMD chips. We think they provide outstanding performance, both for OTP and for analytic workloads. And it's really that simple, we just think the performance is outstanding in the product. >> Mark, your career is quite amazing. I could riff on history for hours but let's focus on the Oracle relationship. Mark, what are the relevant capabilities and key specs of the AMD chips that are used in Exadata X9M on Oracle's cloud? >> Well, thanks. It's really the basis of the great partnership that we have with Oracle on Exadata X9M and that is that the AMD technology uses our third generation of Zen processors. Zen was architected to really bring high performance back to X86, a very strong roadmap that we've executed on schedule to our commitments. And this third generation does all of that, it uses a seven nanometer CPU that is a core that was designed to really bring throughput, bring really high efficiency to computing and just deliver raw capabilities. And so for Exadata X9M, it's really leveraging all of that. It's really a balanced processor and it's implemented in a way to really optimize high performance. That is our whole focus of AMD. It's where we've reset the company focus on years ago. And again, great to see the super smart database team at Oracle really partner with us, understand those capabilities and it's been just great to partner with them to enable Oracle to really leverage the capabilities of the Zen processor. >> Yeah. It's been a pretty amazing 10 or 11 years for both companies. But Mark, how specifically are you working with Oracle at the engineering and product level and what does that mean for your joint customers in terms of what they can expect from the collaboration? >> Well, here's where the collaboration really comes to play. You think about a processor and I'll say, when Juan's team first looked at it, there's general benchmarks and the benchmarks are impressive but they're general benchmarks. And they showed the base processing capability but the partnership comes to bear when it means optimizing for the workloads that Exadata X9M is really delivering to the end customers. And that's where we dive down and as we learn from the Oracle team, we learn to understand where bottlenecks could be, where is there tuning that we could in fact really boost the performance above that baseline that you get in the generic benchmarks. And that's what the teams have done, so for instance, you look at optimizing latency to our DMA, you look at optimizing throughput on oil TP and database processing. When you go through the workloads and you take the traces and you break it down and you find the areas that are bottlenecking and then you can adjust, we have thousands of parameters that can be adjusted for a given workload. And that's the beauty of the partnership. So we have the expertise on the CPU engineering, Oracle Exadata team knows innately what the customers need to get the most out of their platform. And when the teams came together, we actually achieved anywhere from 20% to 50% gains on specific workloads, it is really exciting to see. >> Mark, last question for you is how do you see this relationship evolving in the future? Can you share a little roadmap for the audience? >> You bet. First off, given the deep partnership that we've had on Exadata X9M, it's really allowed us to inform our future design. So in our current third generation, EPYC is that is really what we call our epic server offerings. And it's a 7,003 third gen and Exadara X9M. So what about fourth gen? Well, fourth gen is well underway, ready for the future, but it incorporates learning that we've done in partnership with Oracle. It's going to have even more through capabilities, it's going to have expanded memory capabilities because there's a CXL connect express link that'll expand even more memory opportunities. And I could go on. So that's the beauty of a deep partnership as it enables us to really take that learning going forward. It pays forward and we're very excited to fold all of that into our future generations and provide even a better capabilities to Juan and his team moving forward. >> Yeah, you guys have been obviously very forthcoming. You have to be with Zen and EPYC. Juan, anything you'd like to add as closing comments? >> Yeah. I would say that in the processor market there's been a real acceleration in innovation in the last few years, there was a big move 10, 15 years ago when multicore processors came out. And then we were on that for a while and then things started stagnating, but in the last two or three years, AMD has been leading this, there's been a dramatic acceleration in innovation so it's very exciting to be part of this and customers are getting a big benefit from this. >> All right. Hey, thanks for coming back on The Cube today. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks. Glad to be here. >> All right and thank you for watching this exclusive Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante from The Cube and we'll see you next time. (upbeat jingle)