Oracle To Debut Low-Cost SPARC Chip Next Month

Posted by timothy on Thursday July 30, 2015 @04:24AM 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.

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Re:Licensing by garyisabusyguy · 2015-07-30 05:33 · Score: 4, Insightful

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

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Wherever You Go, There You Are
Re:How timely... by alvieboy · 2015-07-30 06:11 · 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...