The SPU

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The SPU

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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December 19, 2022 at 12:00 am

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David.Poole SSC Guru Points: 75994 More actions · Answer 1

I know where you are coming from but given that SQL is an abstraction to make an RDBMS easy to interact with I don't think a sCPU would work.

The slow bit in SQL Server used to be IO from magnetic disk to CPU & memory. I came across a Quora post asking, is it possible for a processor to bottleneck an SSD? None of this is SQL or DB platform specific.

In terms of billing at a very low level, the Ab Initio ETL platform uses a unit called the SpecInt. They have a SpecInt conversion for every CPU that can be used by Ab Initio. Ab Initio has what it calls a co-op operating system which hooks deeply into the underlying operating system to extract the maximum possible performance. It used to be referred to as a parasitic operating system.

It is extremely effective though the servers it was installed on were expected to be dedicated due to that co-op operating system. If Ab Initio were a car it would be an innocuous hatchback that could do a standing quarter of a mile in 3 seconds flat while delivering 100mpg.

A SQLOS engineered along the same lines would have some mileage. The underlying operating system would either be Linux or a stripped down Windows Core. The question is as to who needs that sort of specialisation and how much would they be prepared to pay for it? Would it work in the cloud or in clouds other than Azure, which is the obvious customer?

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Eric M Russell SSC Guru Points: 125560 More actions · Answer 2

Maybe instead of entirely new chip designs optimized for data processing, it could be stripped down chips that contain only the necessary instructions, so they can be less expensive (more scale-out) and require less power to operate. Think about spinning up an Azure SQL database with 1,000 CPUs for the same cost that we're paying today for 50 CPUs.

"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1004290 More actions · Answer 3

Heh... and still have everything run single threaded because of the way people wrote the code. 😀

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

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