SPARC, made for Sun by Texas Instruments, is always going to be far dearer than any high-volume chip from Intel.

ECONOMIST: Sun Microsystems

The products involved are the already familiar engineered appliances Exadata Database Machine, Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Exalytics In-Memory Machine, Sun ZFS Storage Appliance and the SPARC SuperCluster, an appliance running Solaris 11 on up to 16 SPARC processors with eight cores each.

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The formerly cordial relationship between the two soured when Oracle entered the hardware business by buying Sun Microsystems, which brought along its SPARC microprocessor architecture as part of the dowry.

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Noting Sun's swing toward software, the Silicon Valley rumor mill is wondering whether Sun will sustain the 19-year-old Sparc chip program.

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Of this, SPARC enterprise servers contribute more than 50% of servers revenue for Sun, however the growth has been declining.

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Oracle also announced plans to launch 4 new hardware products by Sun, which will help it drive sales of its database and middleware software, which is optimized for the new SPARC super clusters.

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