(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)

[Music] the history of exadata in the platform is really unique and from my vantage point it started earlier this century as a skunk works 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 and i remember the oracle hp database machine which was announced at oracle open world almost 15 years ago and then exadata kept evolving after the sun acquisition it became a platform that had tightly integrated hardware and software and today exadata it keeps evolving almost like a chameleon to address more workloads and reach new performance levels last april for example oracle announced the availability of exadata x9m in oci oracle cloud infrastructure and introduced the ability to run the autonomous database service or the exa data database service you know oracle often talks about they call it stock exchange performance level kind of no description needed and sort of related capabilities the company as we know is fond of putting out benchmarks and comparisons with previous generations of product and sometimes competitive products that underscore the progress that's being made with exadata such as 87 percent more iops with metrics for latency measured in microseconds mics instead of milliseconds and many other numbers that are industry-leading and compelling especially for mission-critical workloads 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 your 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 loyza 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 thecube and your first appearance thanks for coming on yep happy to be here thank you all right juan let's start with you you've been on thecube 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 yeah so as you know exadata it's designed top down to be the best possible platform for database uh it has a lot of unique capabilities like we make extensive use of rdma smart storage we take advantage of you know everything we can in the leading uh hardware platforms and 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 x9 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 the database software should not be the limit it should be uh the actual physical limits of the hardware and that that's what x9m is all about why won amd chips in x9m uh yeah so we're we're uh introducing uh amd chips we think they provide outstanding performance uh both for oltp and for analytic workloads and it's really that simple we just think that performance is outstanding in the product yeah mark your career is quite amazing i've been around long enough to remember the transition to cmos from emitter coupled logic in the mainframe era back when you were at ibm that was an epic technology call at the time i was of course steeped as an analyst at idc in the pc era and like like many witnessed the tectonic shift that apple's ipod and iphone caused and the timing of you joining amd is quite important in my view because it coincided with the year that pc volumes peaked and marked the beginning of what i call a stagflation period for x86 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 and and uh it's really uh the basis of i think 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 you know architected to really bring high performance you know back to x86 a very very strong road map that we've executed you know on schedule to our commitments and this third generation does all of that it uses a seven nanometer cpu that is a you know core that was designed to really bring uh throughput uh bring you know really high uh efficiency uh to computing uh and just deliver raw capabilities and so uh for uh exadata x9m uh it's really leveraging all of that it's it's a uh implemented in up to 64 cores per socket it's got uh you know really anywhere from 128 to 168 pcie gen 4 io connectivity so you can you can really attach uh you know all of the uh the necessary uh infrastructure and and uh storage uh that's needed uh for exadata performance and also memory you have to feed the beast for those analytics and for the oltp that juan was talking about and so it does have eight lanes of memory for high performance ddr4 so it's really as a balanced processor and it's implemented in a way to really optimize uh high performance that that is our whole focus of uh amd it's where we've you know reset the company focus on years ago and uh again uh you know great to see uh you know the the super smart uh you know database team at oracle really a partner with us understand those capabilities and it's been just great to partner with them to uh you know to you know 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 you know 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 you know i'll say you know when one's team first looked at it there's general benchmarks and the benchmarks are impressive but they're general benchmarks and you know and they showed you know the i'll say the you know the base processing capability but the partnership comes to bear uh when it 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 and as we uh learn from the oracle team we learned to understand where bottlenecks could be uh where is there tuning that we could in fact in fact really boost the performance above i'll say that baseline that you get in the generic benchmarks and that's what the teams have done so for instance you look at you know optimizing latency to rdma you look at just throughput optimizing throughput on otp 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 you know thousands of parameters that can be adjusted for a given workload and that's again that's the beauty of the partnership so we have the expertise on the cpu engineering uh you know oracle exudated 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 percent to 50 gains on specific workloads it's really exciting to see so okay so so i want to follow up on that is that different from the competition how are you driving customer value you mentioned some you know some some percentage improvements are you measuring primarily with with latency how do you look at that well uh you know we are differentiated with the uh in the number of factors we bring a higher core density we bring the highest core density certainly in x86 and and moreover what we've led the industry is how to scale those cores we have a very high performance fabric that connects those together so as as a customer needs more cores again we scale anywhere from 8 to 64 cores but what the trick is uh that is you add more cores you want the scale the scale to be as close to linear as possible and so that's a differentiation we have and we enable that again with that balanced computer of cpu io and memory that we design but the key is you know we pride ourselves at amd of being able to partner in a very deep fashion with our customers we listen very well i think that's uh what we've had the opportunity uh to do with uh juan and his team we appreciate that and and that is how we got the kind of performance benefits that i described earlier it's working together almost like one team and in bringing that best possible capability to the end customers great thank you for that one i want to come back to you can both the exadata database service and the autonomous database service can they take advantage of exadata cloud x9m capabilities that are in that platform yeah absolutely um you know autonomous is basically our self-driving version of the oracle database but fundamentally it is the same uh database course so both of them will take advantage of the tremendous performance that we're getting now you know when when mark takes about 64 cores that's for chip we have two chips you know it's a two socket server so it's 128 128-way processor and then from our point of view there's two threads so from the database point there's 200 it's a 256-way processor and so there's a lot of raw performance there and we've done a lot of work with the amd team to make sure that we deliver that to our customers for all the different kinds of workload including otp analytics but also including for our autonomous database so yes absolutely allah takes advantage of it now juan you know i can't let you go without asking about the competition i've written extensively about the big four hyperscale clouds specifically aws azure google and alibaba and i know that don't hate me sometimes it angers some of my friends at oracle ibm too that i don't include you in that list but but i see oracle specifically is different and really the cloud for the most demanding applications and and top performance databases and not the commodity cloud which of course that angers all my friends at those four companies so i'm ticking everybody off so how does exadata cloud infrastructure x9m compare to the likes of aws azure google and other database cloud services in terms of oltp and analytics value performance cost however you want to frame it yeah so our architecture is fundamentally different uh we've architected our database for the scale out environment so for example we've moved intelligence in the storage uh we've put uh remote direct memory access we put persistent memory into our product so we've done a lot of architectural changes that they haven't and you're starting to see a little bit of that like if you look at some of the things that amazon and google are doing they're starting to realize that hey if you're gonna achieve good results you really need to push some database uh processing into the storage so so they're taking baby steps toward that you know you know roughly 15 years after we we've had a product and again at some point they're gonna realize you really need rdma you really need you know more uh direct access to those capabilities so so they're slowly getting there but you know we're well ahead and what you know the way this is delivered is you know better availability better performance lower latency higher iops so and this is why our customers love our product and you know if you if you look at the global fortune 100 over 90 percent of them are running exit data today and even in the in our cloud uh you know over 60 of the global 100 are running exadata in the oracle cloud because of all the differentiated uh benefits that they get uh from the product uh so yeah we're we're well ahead in the in the database space mark last question for you is how do you see this relationship evolving in the future can you share a little road map for the audience you bet well first off you know given the deep partnership that we've had on exudate x9m uh it it's really allowed us to inform our future design so uh in our current uh third generation epic epyc is uh that is really uh what we call our epic server offerings and it's a 7003 third gen in and exudate x9m so what about fourth gen well fourth gen is well underway uh you know it and uh and uh you know ready to you know for the for the future but it incorporates learning uh that we've done in partnership with with oracle uh it's gonna have even more through capabilities it's gonna 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 you know 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 to fold all of that into our future generations and provide even a better capabilities to one and his team moving forward yeah you guys have been obviously very forthcoming you have to be with with with zen and epic 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 um there was you know a big move 10 15 years ago when multi-core processors came out and then you know we were on that for a while and then things started staggering but in the last two or three years and amd has been leading this um there's been a dramatic uh acceleration in innovation in this space so it's very exciting to be part of this and and customers are getting a big benefit from this all right chance hey thanks for coming back in the cube today really appreciate your time thanks glad to be here all right thank you for watching this exclusive cube conversation this is dave vellante from thecube and we'll see you next time [Music]