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Oracle To Debut Low-Cost SPARC Chip Next Month

Posted by timothy on from the slow-walk-to-the-bottom dept.

jfruh writes: Of the many things Oracle acquired when it absorbed Sun, the SPARC processors have not exactly been making headlines. But that may change next month when the company debuts a new, lower-cost chip that will compete with Intel's Xeon. "Debut," in this case, means only an introduction, though -- not a marketplace debut. From the article: [T]he Sparc M7 will have technologies for encryption acceleration and memory protection built into the chip. It will also include coprocessors to accelerate database performance. "The idea of Sonoma is to take exactly those same technologies and bring them down to very low cost points, so that people can use them in cloud computing and for smaller applications, and even for smaller companies who need a lower entry point," [Oracle head of systems John] Fowler said. ... [Fowler] didn’t talk about prices or say how much cheaper the new Sparc systems will be, and it could potentially be years before Sonoma comes to market—Oracle isn’t yet saying. Its engineers are due to discuss Sonoma at the Hot Chips conference in Silicon Valley at the end of the month, so we might learn more then.

3 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Licensing by garyisabusyguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    With 32 cores, this chip must have the Oracle licensing people very excited

    --
    Wherever You Go, There You Are
  2. Re:Good Job Everyone, Congratulations by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The parent comment should not have been modded down.

    It highlights an important problem: the Debian project has been making one truly bad decision after another recently.

    We all know about Debian's systemd disaster. It was an absolutely stupid move that seriously divided the Debian community, and forced many of its best users over to the BSDs and other OSes.

    They also pretty much killed Debian GNU/kFreeBSD near the end of last year.

    This more recent SPARC nonsense from them is yet another failure on their part.

    Instead of making the project better, these actions have just caused it harm.

    Debian's utility has become nearly non-existent for those running serious servers, and even workstations, where boot problems caused by systemd are just not acceptable.

    The loss of these other platforms and architectures now makes Debian more of a monoculture, which experience shows is never a good thing. Diversity and choice are good for a large-scale software project. They bring together people with different ideas and different needs, which results in more reliable and robust software system across all of the platforms and architectures.

    It's truly saddening to see how Debian, which did so much good for so many years, has hit such hard times lately, with pretty much all of this suffering being self-induced.

  3. Re:How timely... by alvieboy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes, ESA (European Space Agency) uses SPARC, but another implementation (LEON2 and 3, fault tolerant versions [1] ). And NGMP[2] I think is also SPARC based.

    LEON is developed by Gaisler, and was funded by ESA.

    Alvie

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
    [2] http://microelectronics.esa.in...