A senior Intel manager has confirmed that it was Oracle that had the idea of building a processor whose performance profiles could be changed on demand. 

But in an interview with Datacenter Dynamics Patrick Buddenbaum, director of enterprise marketing for Intel said that it was Oracle’s idea to come up with a flexible chip which became the new Xeon E7-8895 v2 processor.

“They came to us and said, ‘Hey, we love the characteristics of these different configurations. Rather than having a customer purchase a specific SKU — such as 15-core 2.8 GHz, or 6-core 3.4 GHz — is there a way we can take advantage of these power states to be able to then dynamically guarantee, if you will, that one part can operate in these different configurations?’”

Oracle approached Intel with the feature request and asked that it was made available to Oracle first. In February Intel introduced the 8890 v2 model, whose specs max out at 15 cores clocked at 2.8 GHz. The key selling point for this 8890 was to present maximum memory caching capacity for advanced analytics.

Oracle’s latest relaunch of its 12c database uses this technology to incorporating far more capabilities than it had before.