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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.

4 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Licensing by pr0nbot · · Score: 5, Funny

    In related news, Oracle have also announced a new per-transistor licensing model.

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

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

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  2. Low cost chip, high cost support by ErichTheRed · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm sure the hardware itself will be cheap. Oracle's hardware is like IBM's mainframes -- they'll practically give away the hardware if you'll burn up MIPS on a regular basis. Even if "give away" is thousands per socket, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the fees for support and any OS licensing. Our relatively large company is a decent sized Oracle DB customer (lots and lots of hosted J2EE enterprisey applications) and the maintenance fees alone, just to be able to run the software, are eye watering.

    The problem is that licensing like that keeps all but the most well heeled customers off SPARC, and hence the popularity will never get much higher than it is. Ever since Linux on x86 became a viable alternative, companies without a real need to run SPARC and by extension Solaris on SPARC are migrating away. Even Debian dropped support for its SPARC port.

    Whether it's the high cost keeping people off SPARC, or the niche nature of Itanium keeping people off Itanium, a system architecture needs a critical mass of customers with a continued need to run on it to be successful.

  3. Re:How timely... by Lord+Apathy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Horse hocky. My Nexis 7 rolled over and died a few weeks ago so I had to scare up a replacement tablet. I choose Asus Z580C to replace it. This tablet has a intel atom Z3530 processor in it, which I found out later is a x86 based processor.

    I've had it for 2 weeks now and I've very pleased with it. To say the x86 can't be used well in a mobile processor is grade a bullshit.

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